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+Project Gutenberg's The Inside of the Cup, Complete, by Winston Churchill
+[Author is the American Winston Churchill not the British]
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Inside of the Cup, Complete
+
+Author: Winston Churchill
+
+Last Updated: March 5, 2009
+Release Date: October 6, 2006 [EBook #5364]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS 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 suddenly decided to
+go abroad without returning home....
+
+That winter Hodder might have been likened to a Niagara for energy; an
+unharnessed Niagara--such would have been his own comment. He seemed
+to turn no wheels, or only a few at least, and feebly. And while the
+spectacle of their rector's zeal was no doubt an edifying one to his
+parishioners, they gave him to understand that they would have been
+satisfied with less. They admired, but chided him gently; and in
+February Mr. Parr offered to take him to Florida. He was tired, and it
+was largely because he dreaded the reflection inevitable in a period
+of rest, that he refused.... And throughout these months, the feeling
+recurred, with increased strength, that McCrae was still watching
+him,--the notion persisted that his assistant held to a theory of his
+own, if he could but be induced to reveal it. Hodder refrained from
+making the appeal. Sometimes he was on the point of losing patience with
+this enigmatic person.
+
+Congratulations on the fact that his congregation was increasing brought
+him little comfort, since a cold analysis of the newcomers who were
+renting pews was in itself an indication of the lack of that thing he
+so vainly sought. The decorous families who were now allying themselves
+with St. John's did so at the expense of other churches either more
+radical or less fashionable. What was it he sought? What did he wish?
+To fill the church to overflowing with the poor and needy as well as the
+rich, and to enter into the lives of all. Yet at a certain point he met
+a resistance that was no less firm because it was baffling. The Word, on
+his lips at least, seemed to have lost it efficacy. The poor heeded it
+not, and he preached to the rich as from behind a glass. They went on
+with their carnival. Why this insatiate ambition on his part in an age
+of unbelief? Other clergymen, not half so fortunate, were apparently
+satisfied; or else--from his conversation with them--either oddly
+optimistic or resigned. Why not he?
+
+It was strange, in spite of everything, that hope sprang up within him,
+a recurrent geyser.
+
+Gradually, almost imperceptibly, he found himself turning more and
+more towards that line of least resistance which other churches were
+following, as the one Modern Solution,--institutional work. After all,
+in the rescuing of bodies some method might yet be discovered to revive
+the souls. And there were the children! Hodder might have been likened
+to an explorer, seeking a direct path when there was none--a royal road.
+And if this were oblique it offered, at least, a definite outlet for his
+energy.
+
+Such was, approximately, the state of his mind early in March
+when Gordon Atterbury came back from a conference in New York on
+institutional work, and filled with enthusiasm. St. John's was
+incredibly behind the times, so he told Hodder, and later the vestry.
+Now that they had, in Mr. Hodder, a man of action and ability--ahem!
+there was no excuse for a parish as wealthy as St. John's, a parish
+with their opportunities, considering the proximity of Dalton Street
+neighbourhood, not enlarging and modernizing the parish house, not
+building a settlement house with kindergartens, schools, workshops,
+libraries, a dispensary and day nurseries. It would undoubtedly be an
+expense--and Mr. Atterbury looked at Mr. Parr, who drummed on the vestry
+table. They would need extra assistants, deaconesses, trained nurses,
+and all that. But there were other churches in the city that were ahead
+of St. John's--a reproach--ahem!
+
+Mr. Parr replied that he had told the rector that he stood ready to
+contribute to such a scheme when he, the rector; should be ready to
+approve it. And he looked at Mr. Hodder.
+
+Mr. Hodder said he had been considering the matter ever since his
+arrival. He had only one criticism of institutional work, that in his
+observation it did not bring the people whom it reached into the Church
+in any great numbers. Perhaps that were too much to ask, in these days.
+For his part he would willingly assume the extra burden, and he was
+far from denying the positive good such work accomplished through
+association and by the raising of standards.
+
+Mr. Ferguson declared his readiness to help. Many of his salesgirls,
+he said, lived in this part of the city, and he would be glad to do
+anything in his power towards keeping them out of the dance-halls and
+such places.
+
+A committee was finally appointed consisting of Mr. Parr, Mr. Atterbury,
+and the rector, to consult architects and to decide upon a site.
+
+Hodder began a correspondence with experts in other cities,
+collected plans, pamphlets, statistics; spent hours with the great
+child-specialist, Dr. Jarvis, and with certain clergymen who believed in
+institutionalism as the hope of the future.
+
+But McCrae was provokingly non-committal.
+
+"Oh, they may try it," he assented somewhat grudgingly, one day when the
+rector had laid out for his inspection the architects' sketch for the
+settlement house. "No doubt it will help many poor bodies along."
+
+"Is there anything else?" the rector asked, looking searchingly at his
+assistant.
+
+"It may as well be that," replied McCrae.
+
+The suspicion began to dawn on Hodder that the Scotch man's ideals were
+as high as his own. Both of them, secretly, regarded the new scheme as a
+compromise, a yielding to the inevitable....
+
+Mr. Ferguson's remark that an enlarged parish house and a new settlement
+house might help to keep some of the young women employed in his
+department store out of the dance-halls interested Hodder, who conceived
+the idea of a dance-hall of their own. For the rector, in the course of
+his bachelor shopping, often resorted to the emporium of his vestryman,
+to stand on the stairway which carried him upward without lifting his
+feet, to roam, fascinated, through the mazes of its aisles, where he
+invariably got lost, and was rescued by suave floor-walkers or pert
+young women in black gowns and white collars and cuffs. But they were
+not all pert--there were many characters, many types. And he often
+wondered whether they did not get tired standing on their feet all day
+long, hesitating to ask them; speculated on their lives--flung as most
+of them were on a heedless city, and left to shift for themselves. Why
+was it that the Church which cared for Mr. Ferguson's soul was unable
+to get in touch with, or make an appeal to, those of his thousand
+employees?
+
+It might indeed have been said that Francis Ferguson cared for his own
+soul, as he cared for the rest of his property, and kept it carefully
+insured,--somewhat, perhaps, on the principle of Pascal's wager. That
+he had been a benefactor to his city no one would deny who had seen the
+facade that covered a whole block in the business district from Tower
+to Vine, surmounted by a red standard with the familiar motto, "When in
+doubt, go to Ferguson's." At Ferguson's you could buy anything from a
+pen-wiper to a piano or a Paris gown; sit in a cool restaurant in summer
+or in a palm garden in winter; leave your baby--if you had one--in
+charge of the most capable trained nurses; if your taste were literary,
+mull over the novels in the Book Department; if you were stout, you
+might be reduced in the Hygiene Department, unknown to your husband and
+intimate friends. In short, if there were any virtuous human wish in the
+power of genius to gratify, Ferguson's was the place. They, even taught
+you how to cook. It was a modern Aladdin's palace: and, like everything
+else modern, much more wonderful than the original. And the soda might
+be likened to the waters of Trevi,--to partake of which is to return.
+
+"When in doubt, go to Ferguson!" Thus Mrs. Larrabbee and other ladies
+interested in good works had altered his motto. He was one of the
+supporters of Galt House, into which some of his own young saleswomen
+had occasionally strayed; and none, save Mr. Parr alone, had been so
+liberal in his gifts. Holder invariably found it difficult to reconcile
+the unassuming man, whose conversation was so commonplace, with the
+titanic genius who had created Ferguson's; nor indeed with the owner of
+the imposing marble mansion at Number 5, Park Street.
+
+The rector occasionally dined there. He had acquired a real affection
+for Mrs. Ferguson, who resembled a burgomaster's wife in her evening
+gowns and jewels, and whose simple social ambitions had been gratified
+beyond her dreams. Her heart had not shrunken in the process, nor had
+she forgotten her somewhat heterogeneous acquaintances in the southern
+part of the city. And it was true that when Gertrude Constable had
+nearly died of appendicitis, it was on this lady's broad bosom that Mrs.
+Constable had wept. Mrs. Ferguson had haunted the house, regardless
+of criticism, and actually quivering with sympathy. Her more important
+dinner parties might have been likened to ill-matched fours-in-hand, and
+Holder had sometimes felt more of pity than of amusement as she sat with
+an expression of terror on her face, helplessly watching certain
+unruly individuals taking their bits in their teeth and galloping madly
+downhill. On one occasion, when he sat beside her, a young man, who
+shall be nameless, was suddenly heard to remark in the midst of an
+accidental lull:
+
+"I never go to church. What's the use? I'm afraid most of us don't
+believe in hell any more."
+
+A silence followed: of the sort that chills. And the young man, glancing
+down the long board at the clergyman, became as red as the carnation in
+his buttonhole, and in his extremity gulped down more champagne.
+
+"Things are in a dreadful state nowadays!" Mrs. Ferguson gasped to
+a paralyzed company, and turned an agonized face to Holder. "I'm so
+sorry," she said, "I don't know why I asked him to-night, except that I
+have to have a young man for Nan, and he's just come to the city, and
+I was sorry for him. He's very promising in a business way; he's in Mr.
+Plimpton's trust company."
+
+"Please don't let it trouble you." Holder turned and smiled a little,
+and added whimsically: "We may as well face the truth."
+
+"Oh, I should expect you to be good about it, but it was unpardonable,"
+she cried....
+
+In the intervals when he gained her attention he strove, by talking
+lightly of other things, to take her mind off the incident, but
+somehow it had left him strangely and--he felt--disproportionately
+depressed,--although he had believed himself capable of facing more or
+less philosophically that condition which the speaker had so frankly
+expressed. Yet the remark, somehow, had had an illuminating effect like
+a flashlight, revealing to him the isolation of the Church as never
+before. And after dinner, as they were going to the smoking-room, the
+offender accosted him shamefacedly.
+
+"I'm awfully sorry, Mr. Holder," he stammered.
+
+That the tall rector's regard was kindly did not relieve his discomfort.
+Hodder laid a hand on his shoulder.
+
+"Don't worry about it," he answered, "I have only one regret as to what
+you said--that it is true."
+
+The other looked at him curiously.
+
+"It's mighty decent of you to take it this way," he laid. Further speech
+failed him.
+
+He was a nice-looking young man, with firm white teeth, and honesty was
+written all over his boyish face. And the palpable fact that his regret
+was more on the clergyman's account than for the social faux pas drew
+Holder the more, since it bespoke a genuineness of character.
+
+He did not see the yearning in the rector's eyes as he turned away...
+Why was it they could not be standing side by side, fighting the same
+fight? The Church had lost him, and thousands like him, and she needed
+them; could not, indeed, do without them.
+
+Where, indeed, were the young men? They did not bother their heads about
+spiritual matters any more. But were they not, he asked himself, franker
+than many of these others, the so-called pillars of the spiritual
+structure?
+
+Mr. Plimpton accosted him. "I congratulate you upon the new plans, Mr.
+Hodder,--they're great," he said. "Mr. Parr and our host are coming down
+handsomely, eh? When we get the new settlement house we'll have a plant
+as up-to-date as any church in the country. When do you break ground?"
+
+"Not until autumn, I believe," Hodder replied. "There are a good many
+details to decide upon yet."
+
+"Well, I congratulate you."
+
+Mr. Plimpton was forever congratulating.
+
+"Up-to-date"--"plant"! More illuminating words, eloquent of Mr.
+Plimpton's ideals. St. John's down at the heels, to be brought up to the
+state of efficiency of Mr. Plimpton's trust company! It was by no means
+the first time he had heard modern attributes on Mr. Plimpton's lips
+applied to a sacred institution, but to-night they had a profoundly
+disquieting effect. To-night, a certain clairvoyance had been vouchsafed
+him, and he beheld these men, his associates and supporters, with a
+detachment never before achieved.
+
+They settled in groups about the room, which was square and high, and
+panelled in Italian walnut, with fluted pilasters,--the capitals of
+which were elaborately carved. And Hodder found himself on a deep
+leather sofa in a corner engaged in a desultory and automatic
+conversation with Everett Constable. Mr. Plimpton, with a large cigar
+between his lips, was the radiating centre of one of the liveliest
+groups, and of him the rector had fallen into a consideration, piecing
+together bits of information that hitherto had floated meaninglessly in
+his mind. It was Mrs. Larrabbee who had given character to the career of
+the still comparatively youthful and unquestionably energetic president
+of the Chamber of Commerce by likening it to a great spiral, starting
+somewhere in outer regions of twilight, and gradually drawing nearer to
+the centre, from which he had never taken his eyes. At the centre
+were Eldon Parr and Charlotte Gore. Wallis Plimpton had made himself
+indispensable to both.
+
+His campaign for the daughter of Thurston Gore had been comparable
+to one of the great sieges of history, for Mr. Plimpton was a
+laughing-stock when he sat down before that fortress. At the end of ten
+years, Charlotte had capitulated, with a sigh of relief, realizing at
+last her destiny. She had become slightly stout, revealing, as time went
+on, no wrinkles--a proof that the union was founded on something more
+enduring than poetry: Statesmanship--that was the secret! Step by step,
+slowly but surely, the memoranda in that matrimonial portfolio were
+growing into accomplished facts; all events, such as displacements of
+power, were foreseen; and the Plimptons, like Bismarck, had only to
+indicate, in case of sudden news, the pigeonhole where the plan of any
+particular campaign was filed.
+
+Mrs. Larrabbee's temptation to be witty at the expense of those for
+whom she had no liking had led Hodder to discount the sketch. He had not
+disliked Mr. Plimpton, who had done him many little kindnesses. He was
+good-natured, never ruffled, widely tolerant, hail-fellow-well-met with
+everybody, and he had enlivened many a vestry meeting with his stories.
+It were hypercritical to accuse him of a lack of originality. And if by
+taking thought, he had arrived, from nowhere, at his present position
+of ease and eminence, success had not turned to ashes in his mouth. He
+fairly exhaled well-being, happiness, and good cheer. Life had gone well
+with him, he wished the same to others.
+
+But to-night, from his corner, Hodder seemed to see Mr. Plimpton with
+new eyes. Not that he stood revealed a villain, which he was far from
+being; it was the air of sophistication, of good-natured if cynical
+acceptance of things as they were--and plenty good enough, too!--that
+jarred upon the rector in his new mood, and it was made manifest to him
+as never before why his appeals from the pulpit had lacked efficacy.
+Mr. Plimpton didn't want the world changed! And in this desire he
+represented the men in that room, and the majority of the congregation
+of St. John's. The rector had felt something of this before, and it
+seemed to him astonishing that the revelation had not come to him
+sooner. Did any one of them, in his heart, care anything for the ideals
+and aspirations of the Church?
+
+As he gazed at them through the gathering smoke they had become
+strangers, receded all at once to a great distance.... Across the room
+he caught the name, Bedloe Hubbell, pronounced with peculiar bitterness
+by Mr. Ferguson. At his side Everett Constable was alert, listening.
+
+"Ten years ago," said a stout Mr. Varnum, the President of the Third
+National Bank, "if you'd told me that that man was to become a demagogue
+and a reformer, I wouldn't have believed you. Why, his company used
+to take rebates from the L. & G., and the Southern--I know it." He
+emphasized the statement with a blow on the table that made the liqueur
+glasses dance. "And now, with his Municipal League, he's going to clean
+up the city, is he? Put in a reform mayor. Show up what he calls the
+Consolidated Tractions Company scandal. Pooh!"
+
+"You got out all right, Varnum. You won't be locked up," said Mr.
+Plimpton, banteringly.
+
+"So did you," retorted Varnum.
+
+"So did Ferguson, so did Constable."
+
+"So did Eldon Parr," remarked another man, amidst a climax of laughter.
+
+"Langmaid handled that pretty well."
+
+Hodder felt Everett Constable fidget.
+
+"Bedloe's all right, but he's a dreamer," Mr. Plimpton volunteered.
+
+"Then I wish he'd stop dreaming," said Mr. Ferguson, and there was more
+laughter, although he had spoken savagely.
+
+"That's what he is, a dreamer," Varnum ejaculated. "Say, he told George
+Carter the other day that prostitution wasn't necessary, that in fifty
+years we'd have largely done away with it. Think of that, and it's as
+old as Sodom and Gomorrah!"
+
+"If Hubbell had his way, he'd make this town look like a Connecticut
+hill village--he'd drive all the prosperity out of it. All the railroads
+would have to abandon their terminals--there'd be no more traffic, and
+you'd have to walk across the bridge to get a drink."
+
+"Well," said Mr. Plimpton, "Tom Beatty's good enough for me, for a
+while."
+
+Beatty, Hodder knew, was the "boss," of the city, with headquarters in a
+downtown saloon.
+
+"Beatty's been maligned," Mr. Varnum declared. "I don't say he's a
+saint, but he's run the town pretty well, on the whole, and kept the
+vice where it belongs, out of sight. He's made his pile, but he's
+entitled to something we all are. You always know where you stand with
+Beatty. But say, if Hubbell and his crowd--"
+
+"Don't worry about Bedloe,--he'll get called in, he'll come home to
+roost like the rest of them," said Mr. Plimpton, cheerfully. "The people
+can't govern themselves,--only Bedloe doesn't know it. Some day he'll
+find it out."...
+
+The French window beside him was open, and Hodder slipped out,
+unnoticed, into the warm night and stood staring at the darkness. His
+one desire had been to get away, out of hearing, and he pressed forward
+over the tiled pavement until he stumbled against a stone balustrade
+that guarded a drop of five feet or so to the lawn below. At the same
+time he heard his name called.
+
+"Is that you, Mr. Hodder?"
+
+He started. The voice had a wistful tremulousness, and might almost
+have been the echo of the leaves stirring in the night air. Then he
+perceived, in a shaft of light from one of the drawing-room windows near
+by, a girl standing beside the balustrade; and as she came towards him,
+with tentative steps, the light played conjurer, catching the silvery
+gauze of her dress and striking an aura through the film of her hair.
+
+"It's Nan Ferguson," she said.
+
+"Of course," he exclaimed, collecting himself. "How stupid of me not to
+have recognized you!"
+
+"I'm so glad you came out," she went on impulsively, yet shyly, "I
+wanted to tell you how sorry I was that that thing happened at the
+table."
+
+"I like that young man," he said.
+
+"Do you?" she exclaimed, with unexpected gratitude. "So do I. He really
+isn't--so bad as he must seem."
+
+"I'm sure of it," said the rector, laughing.
+
+"I was afraid you'd think him wicked," said Nan. "He works awfully hard,
+and he's sending a brother through college. He isn't a bit like--some
+others I know. He wants to make something of himself. And I feel
+responsible, because I had mother ask him to-night."
+
+He read her secret. No doubt she meant him to do so.
+
+"You know we're going away next week, for the summer--that is, mother
+and I," she continued. "Father comes later. And I do hope you'll make us
+a visit, Mr. Hodder--we were disappointed you couldn't come last year."
+Nan hesitated, and thrusting her hand into her gown drew forth an
+envelope and held it out to him. "I intended to give you this to-night,
+to use--for anything you thought best."
+
+He took it gravely. She looked up at him.
+
+"It seems so little--such a selfish way of discharging one's
+obligations, just to write out a cheque, when there is so much trouble
+in the world that demands human kindness as well as material help. I
+drove up Dalton Street yesterday, from downtown. You know how hot it
+was! And I couldn't help thinking how terrible it is that we who have
+everything are so heedless of all that misery. The thought of it took
+away all my pleasure.
+
+"I'd do something more, something personal, if I could. Perhaps I shall
+be able to, next winter. Why is it so difficult for all of us to know
+what to do?"
+
+"We have taken a step forward, at any rate, when we know that it is
+difficult," he said.
+
+She gazed up at him fixedly, her attention caught by an indefinable
+something in his voice, in his smile, that thrilled and vaguely
+disturbed her. She remembered it long afterwards. It suddenly made her
+shy again; as if, in faring forth into the darkness, she had come to the
+threshold of a mystery, of a revelation withheld; and it brought back
+the sense of adventure, of the palpitating fear and daring with which
+she had come to meet him.
+
+"It is something to know," she repeated, half comprehending. The
+scraping of chairs within alarmed her, and she stood ready to fly.
+
+"But I haven't thanked you for this," he said, holding up the envelope.
+"It may be that I shall find some one in Dalton Street--"
+
+"Oh, I hope so," she faltered, breathlessly, hesitating a moment. And
+then she was gone, into the house.
+
+
+
+
+Volume 3.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. THE DIVINE DISCONTENT
+
+I
+
+It was the last Sunday in May, and in another week the annual flight
+to the seashore and the mountains would have begun again. The breezes
+stealing into the church through the open casements wafted hither
+and thither the odours of the chancel flowers, and mingled with those
+fainter and subtler perfumes set free by the rustling of summer gowns.
+
+As on this day he surveyed his decorous and fashionable congregation,
+Hodder had something of that sense of extremity which the great apostle
+to the Gentiles himself must have felt when he stood in the midst of the
+Areopagus and made his vain yet sublime appeal to Athenian indifference
+and luxury. "And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now
+commandeth all men everywhere to repent.".. Some, indeed, stirred
+uneasily as the rector paused, lowering their eyes before the intensity
+of his glance, vaguely realizing that the man had flung the whole
+passion of his being into the appeal.
+
+Heedlessness--that was God's accusation against them, against the age.
+Materialism, individualism! So absorbed were they in the pursuit of
+wealth, of distraction, so satisfied with the current philosophy, so
+intent on surrounding themselves with beautiful things and thus shutting
+out the sterner view, that they had grown heedless of the divine
+message. How few of them availed themselves of their spiritual
+birthright to renew their lives at the altar rail! And they had
+permitted their own children to wander away.... Repent!
+
+There was a note of desperation in his appeal, like that of the hermit
+who stands on a mountain crag and warns the gay and thoughtless of the
+valley of the coming avalanche. Had they heard him at last? There were a
+few moments of tense silence, during which he stood gazing at them. Then
+he raised his arm in benediction, gathered up his surplice, descended
+the pulpit steps, and crossed swiftly the chancel....
+
+He had, as it were, turned on all the power in a supreme effort to reach
+them. What if he had failed again? Such was the misgiving that beset
+him, after the service, as he got out of his surplice, communicated by
+some occult telepathy.... Mr. Parr was awaiting him, and summoning his
+courage, hope battling against intuition, he opened the door into the
+now empty church and made his way toward the porch, where the sound of
+voices warned him that several persons were lingering. The nature of
+their congratulations confirmed his doubts. Mrs. Plimpton, resplendent
+and looking less robust than usual in one of her summer Paris gowns,
+greeted him effusively.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Hodder, what a wonderful sermon!" she cried. "I can't express
+how it made me feel--so delinquent! Of course that is exactly the effect
+you wished. And I was just telling Wallis I was so glad I waited until
+Tuesday to go East, or I should have missed it. You surely must come on
+to Hampton and visit us, and preach it over again in our little stone
+church there, by the sea. Good-by and don't forget! I'll write you,
+setting the date, only we'd be glad to have you any time."
+
+"One of the finest I ever heard--if not the finest," Mr. Plimpton
+declared, with a kind of serious 'empressement', squeezing his hand.
+
+Others stopped him; Everett Constable, for one, and the austere Mrs.
+Atterbury. Hodder would have avoided the ever familiar figure of her
+son, Gordon, in the invariable black cutaway and checked trousers, but
+he was standing beside Mr. Parr.
+
+"Ahem! Why, Mr. Hodder," he exclaimed, squinting off his glasses, "that
+was a magnificent effort. I was saying to Mr. Parr that it isn't
+often one hears a sermon nowadays as able as that, and as sound. Many
+clergymen refrain from preaching them, I sometimes think, because they
+are afraid people won't like them."
+
+"I scarcely think it's that," the rector replied, a little shortly.
+"We're afraid people won't heed them."
+
+He became aware, as he spoke, of a tall young woman, who had cast an
+enigmatic glance first at Gordon Atterbury, and then at himself.
+
+"It was a good sermon," said Mr. Parr. "You're coming to lunch, Hodder?"
+
+The rector nodded. "I'm ready when you are," he answered.
+
+"The motor's waiting," said the banker, leading the way down the steps
+to the sidewalk, where he turned. "Alison, let me introduce Mr. Hodder.
+This is my daughter," he added simply.
+
+This sudden disclosure of the young woman's identity had upon Hodder a
+certain electric effect, and with it came a realization of the extent
+to which--from behind the scenes, so to speak--she had gradually aroused
+him to a lively speculation. She seemed to have influenced, to a
+greater or less degree, so many lives with which he had come into
+touch! Compelled persons to make up their minds about her! And while he
+sympathized with Eldon Parr in his abandonment, he had never achieved
+the full condemnation which he felt--an impartial Christian morality
+would have meted out.
+
+As he uttered the conventional phrase and took her hand, he asked
+himself whether her personality justified his interest. Her glance at
+Gordon Atterbury in the midst of that gentleman's felicitations on the
+sermon had been expressive, Hodder thought, of veiled amusement slightly
+tinctured with contempt; and he, Hodder, felt himself to have grown warm
+over it. He could not be sure that Alison Parr had not included, in her
+inner comment, the sermon likewise, on which he had so spent himself.
+What was she doing at church? As her eyes met his own, he seemed to
+read a challenge. He had never encountered a woman--he decided--who
+so successfully concealed her thought, and at the same time so incited
+curiosity about it.
+
+The effect of her reappearance on Gordon Atterbury was painfully
+apparent, and Mrs. Larrabbee's remark, "that he had never got over it,"
+recurred to Hodder. He possessed the virtue of being faithful, at least,
+in spite of the lady's apostasy, and he seemed to be galvanized into a
+tenfold nervousness as he hustled after them and handed her, with the
+elaborate attention little men are apt to bestow upon women, into the
+motor.
+
+"Er--how long shall you be here, Alison?" he asked. "I don't know," she
+answered, not unkindly, but with a touch of indifference.
+
+"You treat us shamefully," he informed her, "upon my word! But I'm
+coming to call."
+
+"Do," said Alison. Hodder caught her eye again, and this time he was
+sure that she surprised in him a certain disdain of Mr. Atterbury's
+zeal. Her smile was faint, yet unmistakable.
+
+He resented it. Indeed, it was with a well-defined feeling of antagonism
+that he took his seat, and this was enhanced as they flew westward, Mr.
+Parr wholly absorbed with the speaking trumpet, energetically rebuking
+at every bounce. In the back of the rector's mind lay a weight, which he
+identified, at intervals, with what he was now convinced was the failure
+of his sermon... Alison took no part in the casual conversation that
+began when they reached the boulevard and Mr. Parr abandoned the
+trumpet, but lay back in silence and apparently with entire comfort in a
+corner of the limousine.
+
+At the lunch-table Mr. Parr plunged into a discussion of some of the
+still undecided details of the new settlement house, in which, as the
+plan developed, he had become more and more interested. He had made
+himself responsible, from time to time, for additional sums, until the
+original estimate had been almost doubled. Most of his suggestions had
+come from Hodder, who had mastered the subject with a thoroughness that
+appealed to the financier: and he had gradually accepted the rector's
+idea of concentrating on the children. Thus he had purchased an
+adjoining piece of land that was to be a model playground, in connection
+with the gymnasium and swimming-pool. The hygienic department was to be
+all that modern science could desire.
+
+"If we are going to do the thing," the banker would, remark, "we may as
+well do it thoroughly; we may as well be leaders and not followers."
+
+So, little by little, the scheme had grown to proportions that sometimes
+appalled the rector when he realized how largely he had been responsible
+for the additions,--in spite of the lukewarmness with which he had
+begun. And yet it had occasionally been Mr. Parr who, with a sweep
+of his hand, had added thousands to a particular feature: thus the
+dance-hall had become, in prospect, a huge sun-parlour at the top of the
+building, where the children were to have their kindergartens and games
+in winter; and which might be shaded and opened up to the breezes
+in summer. What had reconciled Hodder to the enterprise most of all,
+however, was the chapel--in the plan a beautiful Gothic church--whereby
+he hoped to make the religious progress keep pace with the social. Mr.
+Parr was decidedly in sympathy with this intention, and referred to it
+now.
+
+"I was much impressed by what you said in your sermon to-day as to the
+need of insisting upon authority in religious matters," he declared,
+"and I quite agree that we should have a chapel of some size at the
+settlement house for that reason. Those people need spiritual control.
+It's what the age needs. And when I think of some of the sermons printed
+in the newspapers to-day, and which are served up as Christianity, there
+is only one term to apply to them--they are criminally incendiary."
+
+"But isn't true Christianity incendiary, in your meaning of the word?"
+
+It was Alison who spoke, in a quiet and musical voice that was in
+striking contrast to the tone of Mr. Parr, which the rector had thought
+unusually emphatic. It was the first time she had shown an inclination
+to contribute to the talk. But since Hodder had sat down at the table
+her presence had disturbed him, and he had never been wholly free from
+an uncomfortable sense that he was being measured and weighed.
+
+Once or twice he had stolen a glance at her as she sat, perfectly at
+ease, and asked himself whether she had beauty, and it dawned upon
+him little by little that the very proportion she possessed made for
+physical unobtrusiveness. She was really very tall for a woman. At first
+he would have said her nose was straight, when he perceived that it
+had a delicate hidden curve; her eyes were curiously set, her dark hair
+parted in the middle, brought down low on each side of the forehead and
+tied in a Grecian knot. Thus, in truth, he observed, were seemingly all
+the elements of the classic, even to the firm yet slender column of the
+neck. How had it eluded him?
+
+Her remark, if it astonished Hodder, had a dynamic effect on Eldon Parr.
+And suddenly the rector comprehended that the banker had not so much
+been talking to him as through him; had been, as it were, courting
+opposition.
+
+"What do you mean by Christianity being incendiary?" he demanded.
+
+"Incendiary, from your point of view--I made, the qualification," Alison
+replied, apparently unmoved by his obvious irritation. "I don't
+pretend to be a Christian, as you know, but if there is one element in
+Christianity that distinguishes it, it is the brotherhood of man.
+That's pure nitroglycerin, though it's been mixed with so much sawdust.
+Incendiary is a mild epithet. I never read the sermons you refer to;
+I dare say they're crude, but they're probably attempts to release
+an explosive which would blow your comfortable social system and its
+authority into atoms."
+
+Hodder, who had listened in amazement, glanced at the banker. He had
+never before heard him opposed, or seen him really angry.
+
+"I've heard that doctrine," cried Mr. Parr. "Those who are dissatisfied
+with things as they are because they have been too stupid or too weak
+or self-indulgent to rise, find it easy to twist the principles of
+Christianity into revolutionary propaganda. It's a case of the devil
+quoting Scripture. The brotherhood of man! There has never been an age
+when philanthropy and organized charity were on such a scale as to-day."
+
+A certain gallant, indomitable ring crept into Alison's voice; she did
+not seem in the least dismayed or overborne.
+
+"But isn't that just where most so-called Christians make their
+mistake?" she asked. "Philanthropy and organized charity, as they exist
+to-day, have very little to do with the brotherhood of man. Mightn't it
+be you who are fooling yourselves instead of the incendiaries fooling
+themselves So long as you can make yourselves believe that this kind of
+charity is a logical carrying out of the Christian principles, so long
+are your consciences satisfied with the social system which your class,
+very naturally, finds so comfortable and edifying. The weak and idiotic
+ought to be absurdly grateful for what is flung to them, and heaven
+is gained in the throwing. In this way the rich inevitably become the
+elect, both here and hereafter, and the needle's eye is widened into a
+gap."
+
+There was on Mr. Parr's lips a smile not wholly pleasant to see. Indeed,
+in the last few minutes there had been revealed to Hodder a side of
+the banker's character which had escaped him in the two years of their
+acquaintance.
+
+"I suppose," said Mr. Parr, slowly, drumming on the table, "you would
+say that of the new settlement house of St. John's, whereby we hope to
+raise a whole neighbourhood."
+
+"Yes, I should," replied Alison, with spirit. "The social system by
+which you thrive, and which politically and financially you strive to
+maintain, is diametrically opposed to your creed, which is supposed to
+be the brotherhood of man. But if that were really your creed, you would
+work for it politically and financially. You would see that your Church
+is trying to do infinitesimally what the government, but for your
+opposition, might do universally. Your true creed is the survival of
+the fittest. You grind these people down into what is really an economic
+slavery and dependence, and then you insult and degrade them by inviting
+them to exercise and read books and sing hymns in your settlement
+house, and give their children crackers and milk and kindergartens and
+sunlight! I don't blame them for not becoming Christians on that basis.
+Why, the very day I left New York a man over eighty, who had been
+swindled out of all he had, rather than go to one of those Christian
+institutions deliberately forged a check and demanded to be sent to
+the penitentiary. He said he could live and die there with some
+self-respect."
+
+"I might have anticipated that you would ultimately become a Socialist,
+Alison," Mr. Parr remarked--but his voice trembled.
+
+"I don't know whether I'm a Socialist or an Anarchist," she answered.
+Hodder thought he detected a note of hopelessness in her voice, and the
+spirit in it ebbed a little. Not only did she seem indifferent to her
+father's feeling--which incidentally added fuel to it--but her splendid
+disregard of him, as a clergyman, had made an oddly powerful appeal.
+And her argument! His feelings, as he listened to this tremendous
+arraignment of Eldon Parr by his daughter, are not easily to be
+described. To say that she had compelled him, the rector of St. John's,
+at last to look in the face many conditions which he had refused to
+recognize would be too definite a statement. Nevertheless, some such
+thing had occurred. Refutations sprang to his lips, and died there,
+though he had no notion of uttering them. He saw that to admit her
+contentions would be to behold crumble into ruins the structure that he
+had spent a life in rearing; and yet something within him responded to
+her words--they had the passionate, convincing ring of truth.
+
+By no means the least of their disturbing effects was due to the fact
+that they came as a climax to, as a fulfilment of the revelation he had
+had at the Fergusons', when something of the true nature of Mr. Plimpton
+and others of his congregation had suddenly been laid bare. And now
+Hodder looked at Eldon Parr to behold another man from the one he had
+known, and in that moment realized that their relationship could never
+again be the same... Were his sympathies with the daughter?
+
+"I don't know what I believe," said Alison, after a pause. "I've ceased
+trying to find out. What's the use!" She appeared now to be addressing
+no one in particular.
+
+A servant entered with a card, and the banker's hand shook perceptibly
+as he put down his claret and adjusted his glasses.
+
+"Show him into my office upstairs, and tell him I'll see him at once,"
+he said, and glanced at the rector. But it was Alison whom he addressed.
+"I must leave Mr. Hodder to answer your arguments," he added, with an
+attempt at lightness; and then to the rector: "Perhaps you can convince
+her that the Church is more sinned against than sinning, and that
+Christians are not such terrible monsters after all. You'll excuse me?"
+
+"Certainly." Hodder had risen.
+
+
+
+II
+
+"Shall we have coffee in the garden?" Alison asked. "It's much nicer
+outside this time of year."
+
+For an instant he was at a loss to decide whether to accede, or to make
+an excuse and leave the house. Wisdom seemed to point to flight.
+But when he glanced at her he saw to his surprise that the mood
+of abstraction into which she had fallen still held her; that the
+discussion which had aroused Eldon Parr to such dramatic anger had left
+her serious and thoughtful. She betrayed no sense of triumph at having
+audaciously and successfully combated him, and she appeared now only
+partially to be aware of Hodder's presence. His interest, his curiosity
+mounted suddenly again, overwhelming once more the antagonism which
+he had felt come and go in waves; and once more his attempted
+classification of her was swept away. She had relapsed into an enigma.
+
+"I like the open air," he answered, "and I have always wished to see the
+garden. I have admired it from the windows."
+
+"It's been on my mind for some years," she replied, as she led the way
+down a flight of steps into the vine-covered pergola. "And I intend to
+change parts of it while I am out here. It was one of my first attempts,
+and I've learned more since."
+
+"You must forgive my ignorant praise," he said, and smiled. "I have
+always thought it beautiful: But I can understand that an artist is
+never satisfied."
+
+She turned to him, and suddenly their eyes met and held in a momentary,
+electric intensity that left him warm and agitated. There was nothing
+coquettish in the glance, but it was the first distinct manifestation
+that he was of consequence. She returned his smile, without levity.
+
+"Is a clergyman ever satisfied?" she asked.
+
+"He ought not to be," replied Hodder, wondering whether she had read
+him.
+
+"Although you were so considerate, I suppose you must have thought it
+presumptuous of me to criticize your profession, which is religion."
+
+"Religion, I think, should be everybody's," he answered quietly.
+
+She made no reply. And he entered, as into another world, the circular
+arbour in which the pergola ended, so complete in contrast was its
+atmosphere to that of the house. The mansion he had long since grown
+to recognize as an expression of the personality of its owner, but this
+classic bower was as remote from it as though it were in Greece. He
+was sensitive to beauty, yet the beauty of the place had a perplexing
+quality, which he felt in the perfect curves of the marble bench, in
+the marble basin brimming to the tip with clear water,--the surface
+of which, flecked with pink petals, mirrored the azure sky through the
+leafy network of the roof. In one green recess a slender Mercury hastily
+adjusted his sandal.
+
+Was this, her art, the true expression of her baffling personality? As
+she had leaned back in the corner of the automobile she had given
+him the impression of a languor almost Oriental, but this had been
+startlingly dispelled at the lunch-table by the revelation of an
+animation and a vitality which had magically transformed her. But now,
+as under the spell of a new encompassment of her own weaving, she seemed
+to revert to her former self, sinking, relaxed, into a wicker lounge
+beside the basin, one long and shapely hand in the water, the other idle
+in her lap. Her eyes, he remarked, were the contradiction in her face.
+Had they been larger, and almond-shaped, the illusion might have been
+complete. They were neither opaque nor smouldering,--but Western eyes,
+amber-coloured, with delicately stencilled rays and long lashes. And as
+they gazed up at him now they seemed to reflect, without disclosing
+the flitting thoughts behind them. He felt antagonism and attraction in
+almost equal degree--the situation transcended his experience.
+
+"You don't intend to change this?" he asked, with an expressive sweep of
+his hand.
+
+"No," she said, "I've always liked it. Tell me what you feel about it."
+
+He hesitated.
+
+"You resent it," she declared.
+
+"Why do you say that?" he demanded quickly.
+
+"I feel it," she answered calmly, but with a smile.
+
+"'Resent' would scarcely be the proper word," he contended, returning
+her smile, yet hesitating again.
+
+"You think it pagan," she told him.
+
+"Perhaps I do," he answered simply, as though impressed by her
+felicitous discovery of the adjective.
+
+Alison laughed.
+
+"It's pagan because I'm pagan, I suppose."
+
+"It's very beautiful--you have managed to get an extraordinary
+atmosphere," he continued, bent on doing himself an exact justice. "But I
+should say, if you pressed me, that it represents to me the deification
+of beauty to the exclusion of all else. You have made beauty the Alpha
+and Omega."
+
+"There is nothing else for me," she said.
+
+The coffee-tray arrived and was deposited on a wicker table beside her.
+She raised herself on an elbow, filled his cup and handed it to him.
+
+"And yet," he persisted, "from the manner in which you spoke at the
+table--"
+
+"Oh, don't imagine I haven't thought? But thinking isn't--believing."
+
+"No," he admitted, with a touch of sadness, "you are right. There were
+certain comments you made on the Christian religion--"
+
+She interrupted him again.
+
+"As to the political side of it, which is Socialism, so far as I can
+see. If there is any other side, I have never been able to discover
+it. It seems to me that if Christians were logical, they should be
+Socialists. The brotherhood of man, cooperation--all that is Socialism,
+isn't it? It's opposed to the principle of the survival of the fittest,
+which so many of these so-called Christians practise. I used to think,
+when I came back from Paris, that I was a Socialist, and I went to a lot
+of their meetings in New York, and to lectures. But after a while I saw
+there was something in Socialism that didn't appeal to me, something
+smothering,--a forced cooperation that did not leave one free. I wanted
+to be free, I've been striving all my life to be free," she exclaimed
+passionately, and was silent an instant, inspecting him. "Perhaps I
+owe you an apology for speaking as I did before a clergyman--especially
+before an honest one."
+
+He passed over the qualification with a characteristic smile.
+
+"Oh, if we are going to shut our ears to criticism we'd better give
+up being clergymen," he answered. "I'm afraid there is a great deal of
+truth in what you said."
+
+"That's generous of you!" she exclaimed, and thrilled him with the
+tribute. Nor was the tribute wholly in the words: there had come
+spontaneously into her voice an exquisite, modulated note that haunted
+him long after it had died away....
+
+"I had to say what I thought," she continued earnestly; "I stood it
+as long as I could. Perhaps you didn't realize it, but my father
+was striking at me when he referred to your sermon, and spiritual
+control--and in other things he said when you were talking about the
+settlement-house. He reserves for himself the right to do as he pleases,
+but insists that those who surround him shall adopt the subserviency
+which he thinks proper for the rest of the world. If he were a Christian
+himself, I shouldn't mind it so much."
+
+Hodder was silent. The thought struck him with the force of a great
+wind.
+
+"He's a Pharisee," Alison went on, following the train of her thought.
+"I remember the first time I discovered that--it was when I was reading
+the New Testament carefully, in the hope of finding something in
+Christianity I might take hold of. And I was impressed particularly by
+the scorn with which Christ treated the Pharisees. My father, too, if he
+had lived in those days, would have thought Christ a seditious person,
+an impractical, fanatical idealist, and would have tried to trip him
+up with literal questions concerning the law. His real and primary
+interest--is in a social system that benefits himself and his kind,
+and because this is so, he, and men like him, would have it appear that
+Christianity is on the side of what they term law and order. I do not
+say that they are hypocritical, that they reason this out. They are
+elemental; and they feel intuitively that Christianity contains a vital
+spark which, if allowed to fly, would start a conflagration beyond their
+control. The theologians have helped them to cover the spark with ashes,
+and naturally they won't allow the ashes to be touched, if they can help
+it."
+
+She lay very still.
+
+The rector had listened to her, at first with amazement, then with
+more complicated sensations as she thus dispassionately discussed the
+foremost member of his congregation and the first layman of the diocese,
+who was incidentally her own father. In her masterly analysis of Eldon
+Parr, she had brought Hodder face to face with the naked truth, and
+compelled him to recognize it. How could he attempt to refute it, with
+honesty?
+
+He remembered Mr. Parr's criticism of Alison. There had been hardness in
+that, though it were the cry of a lacerated paternal affection. In that,
+too, a lack of comprehension, an impotent anger at a visitation not
+understood, a punishment apparently unmerited. Hodder had pitied him
+then--he still pitied him. In the daughter's voice was no trace of
+resentment. No one, seemingly, could be farther removed from him (the
+rector of St. John's) in her opinions and views of life, than Allison
+Parr; and yet he felt in her an undercurrent, deep and strong, which
+moved him strangely, strongly, irresistibly; he recognized a passionate
+desire for the truth, and the courage to face it at any cost, and a
+capacity for tenderness, revealed in flashes.
+
+"I have hurt you," she exclaimed. "I am sorry."
+
+He collected himself.
+
+"It is not you who have hurt me," he replied. "Reflections on the
+contradictions and imperfections of life are always painful. And since I
+have been here, I have seen a great deal of your father."
+
+"You are fond of him!"
+
+He hesitated. It was not an ordinary conversation they were dealing with
+realities, and he had a sense that vital issues were at stake. He
+had, in that moment, to make a revaluation of his sentiments for the
+financier--to weigh the effect of her indictment.
+
+"Yes," he answered slowly, "I am fond of him. He has shown me a side of
+himself, perhaps, that other men have not seen,--and he is very lonely."
+
+"You pity him." He started at her word. "I guessed that from an
+expression that crossed your face when we were at the table. But surely
+you must have observed the incongruity of his relationship with
+your Church! Surely, in preaching as you did this morning against
+materialism, individualism, absorption in the pursuit of wealth, you
+must have had my father in mind as the supreme example! And yet he
+listened to you as serenely as though he had never practised any of
+these things!
+
+"Clergymen wonder why Christianity doesn't make more progress to-day;
+well, what strikes the impartial observer who thinks about the subject
+at all, as one reason, is the paralyzing inconsistency of an alliance
+between those who preach the brotherhood of man and those who are
+opposed to it. I've often wondered what clergymen would say about it, if
+they were frank--only I never see any clergymen."
+
+He was strongly agitated. He did not stop--strangely enough--to reflect
+how far they had gone, to demand by what right she brought him to the
+bar, challenged the consistency of his life. For she had struck, with
+a ruthless precision, at the very core of his trouble, revealed it for
+what it was.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I can see how we may be accused of inconsistency, and
+with much justice."
+
+His refusal to excuse and vindicate himself impressed her as no attempt
+at extenuation could have done. Perhaps, in that moment, her quick
+instinct divined something of his case, something of the mental
+suffering he strove to conceal. Contrition shone in her eyes.
+
+"I ought not to have said that," she exclaimed gently. "It is so easy
+for outsiders to criticize those who are sincere--and I am sure you are.
+We cannot know all the perplexities. But when we look at the Church, we
+are puzzled by that--which I have mentioned--and by other things."
+
+"What other things?" he demanded.
+
+She hesitated in her turn.
+
+"I suppose you think it odd, my having gone to church, feeling as I do,"
+she said. "But St. John's is now the only place vividly associated with
+my mother. She was never at home here, in this house. I always go at
+least once when I am out here. And I listened to your sermon intently."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I wanted to tell you this: you interested me as I had not been
+interested since I was twenty, when I made a desperate attempt to become
+a Christian--and failed. Do you know how you struck me? It was as a
+man who actually had a great truth which he was desperately trying to
+impart, and could not. I have not been in a church more than a dozen
+times in the last eight years, but you impressed me as a man who felt
+something--whatever it is."
+
+He did not speak.
+
+"But why," she cried, "do you insist on what you cell authority? As
+a modern woman who has learned to use her own mind, I simply can't
+believe, if the God of the universe is the moral God you assert him to
+be, that he has established on earth an agency of the kind you infer,
+and delegated to it the power of life and death over human souls.
+Perhaps you do not go so far, but if you make the claim at all you must
+make it in its entirety. There is an idea of commercialism, of monopoly
+in that conception which is utterly repugnant to any one who tries to
+approach the subject with a fresh mind, and from an ideal point of view.
+And religion must be idealism--mustn't it?
+
+"Your ancient monks and saints weren't satisfied until they had settled
+every detail of the invisible world, of the past and future. They
+mapped it out as if it were a region they had actually explored, like
+geographers. They used their reason, and what science they had, to make
+theories about it which the churches still proclaim as the catholic and
+final truth. You forbid us to use our reason. You declare, in order to
+become Christians, that we have to accept authoritative statements. Oh,
+can't you see that an authoritative statement is just what an ethical
+person doesn't want? Belief--faith doesn't consist in the mere
+acceptance of a statement, but in something much higher--if we can
+achieve it. Acceptance of authority is not faith, it is mere credulity,
+it is to shirk the real issue. We must believe, if we believe at all,
+without authority. If we knew, there would be no virtue in striving. If
+I choose a God," she added, after a pause, "I cannot take a consensus of
+opinion about him,--he must be my God."
+
+Hodder did not speak immediately. Strange as it may seem, he had
+never heard the argument, and the strength of it, reenforced by the
+extraordinary vitality and earnestness of the woman who had uttered it,
+had a momentary stunning effect. He sat contemplating her as she lay
+back among the cushions, and suddenly he seemed to see in her the
+rebellious child of which her father had spoken. No wonder Eldon Parr
+had misunderstood her, had sought to crush her spirit! She was to be
+dealt with in no common way, nor was the consuming yearning he discerned
+in her to be lightly satisfied.
+
+"The God of the individualist," he said at length--musingly, not
+accusingly.
+
+"I am an individualist," she admitted simply. "But I am at least logical
+in that philosophy, and the individualists who attend the churches
+to-day are not. The inconsistency of their lives is what makes those
+of us who do not go to church doubt the efficacy of their creed, which
+seems to have no power to change them. The majority of people in St.
+John's are no more Christians than I am. They attend service once a
+week, and the rest of the time they are bent upon getting all they can
+of pleasure and profit for themselves. Do you wonder that those who
+consider this spectacle come inevitably to the conclusion that either
+Christianity is at fault, is outworn, or else that it is presented in
+the wrong way?"
+
+The rector rose abruptly, walked to the entrance of the arbour, and
+stood staring out across the garden. Presently he turned and came back
+and stood over her.
+
+"Since you ask me," he said slowly, "I do not wonder at it."
+
+She raised her eyes swiftly.
+
+"When you speak like that," she exclaimed with an enthusiasm that
+stirred him, despite the trouble of his mind, "I cannot think of you as
+a clergyman,--but as a man. Indeed," she added, in the surprise of her
+discovery, "I have never thought of you as a clergyman--even when I
+first saw you this morning. I could not account then for a sense of
+duality about you that puzzled me. Do you always preach as earnestly as
+that?"
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I felt as if you were throwing your whole soul into the effort-=oh,
+I felt it distinctly. You made some of them, temporarily, a little
+uncomfortable, but they do not understand you, and you didn't change
+them. It seemed to me you realized this when Gordon Atterbury spoke
+to you. I tried to analyze the effect on myself--if it had been in the
+slightest degree possible for my reason to accept what you said you
+might, through sheer personality, have compelled me to reconsider. As it
+was, I found myself resisting you."
+
+With his hands clasped behind him, he paced across the arbour and back
+again.
+
+"Have you ever definitely and sincerely tried to put what the Church
+teaches into practice?" he asked.
+
+"Orthodox Christianity? penance, asceticism,
+self-abnegation--repression--falling on my knees and seeking a
+forgiveness out of all proportion to the trespass, and filled with a
+sense of total depravity? If I did that I should lose myself--the only
+valuable thing I've got."
+
+Hodder, who had resumed his pacing, glanced at her involuntarily, and
+fought an inclination to agree with her.
+
+"I see no one upon whom I can rely but myself," she went on with the
+extraordinary energy she was able to summon at will, "and I am
+convinced that self-sacrifice--at least, indiscriminate, unreasoning
+self-sacrifice--is worse than useless, and to teach it is criminal
+ignorance. None of the so-called Christian virtues appeals to me: I hate
+humility. You haven't it. The only happiness I can see in the world
+lies in self-expression, and I certainly shouldn't find that in sewing
+garments for the poor.
+
+"The last thing that I could wish for would be immortality as orthodox
+Christianity depicts it! And suppose I had followed the advice of my
+Christian friends and remained here, where they insisted my duty was,
+what would have happened to me? In a senseless self-denial I should
+gradually have, withered into a meaningless old maid, with no opinions
+of my own, and no more definite purpose in life than to write checks for
+charities. Your Christianity commands that women shall stay at home, and
+declares that they are not entitled to seek their own salvation, to
+have any place in affairs, or to meddle with the realm of the intellect.
+Those forbidden gardens are reserved for the lordly sex. St. Paul, you
+say, put us in our proper place some twenty centuries ago, and we are to
+remain there for all time."
+
+He felt sweeping through him the reverse current of hostility.
+
+"And what I preach," he asked, "has tended to confirm you in such a mean
+conception of Christianity?"
+
+Her eye travelled over the six feet of him--the kindling, reflecting
+eye of the artist; it rested for a moment on the protesting locks of his
+hair, which apparently could not be cut short enough to conform; on the
+hands, which were strong and sinewy; on the wide, tolerant mouth, with
+its rugged furrows, on the breadth and height of the forehead. She lay
+for a moment, inert, considering.
+
+"What you preach--yes," she answered, bravely meeting his look. "What
+you are--no. You and your religion are as far apart as the poles. Oh,
+this old argument, the belief that has been handed down to the man, the
+authority with which he is clothed, and not the man himself! How can one
+be a factor in life unless one represents something which is the fruit
+of actual, personal experience? Your authority is for the weak, the
+timid, the credulous,--for those who do not care to trust themselves,
+who run for shelter from the storms of life to a 'papier-mache'
+fortress, made to look like rock. In order to preach that logically you
+should be a white ascetic, with a well-oiled manner, a downcast look
+lest you stumble in your pride; lest by chance you might do something
+original that sprang out of your own soul instead of being an imitation
+of the saints. And if your congregation took your doctrine literally,
+I can see a whole army of white, meek Christians. But you are not like
+that. Can't you see it for yourself?" she exclaimed.
+
+"Can't you feel that you are an individual, a personality, a force that
+might be put to great uses? That will be because you are open-minded,
+because there is room in you for growth and change?"
+
+He strove with all his might to quell the inner conflagration which she
+had fanned into leaping flames. Though he had listened before to doubt
+and criticism, this woman, with her strange shifting moods of calm and
+passion, with her bewildering faculty of changing from passive to active
+resistance, her beauty (once manifest, never to be forgotten), her
+unique individuality that now attracted, now repelled, seemed for
+the moment the very incarnation of the forces opposed to him and his
+religion. Holder, as he looked at her, had a flash of fierce resentment
+that now, of all times, she should suddenly have flung herself across
+his path. For she was to be reckoned with. Why did he not tell her she
+was an egoist? Why didn't he speak out, defend his faith, denounce her
+views as prejudiced and false?
+
+"Have I made you angry?" he heard her say. "I am sorry."
+
+It was the hint of reproach in her tone to which the man in him
+instantly responded. And what he saw now was his portrait she had
+painted. The thought came to him: was he indeed greater, more vital than
+the religion he professed? God forbid! Did he ring true, and it false?
+
+She returned his gaze. And gradually, under her clear olive skin, he saw
+the crimson colour mounting higher.... She put forth her hand, simply,
+naturally, and pressed his own, as though they had been friends for a
+lifetime....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X. THE MESSENGER IN THE CHURCH
+
+
+I
+
+The annual scourge of summer had descended pitilessly upon the city once
+more, enervating, depressing, stagnating, and people moved languidly
+in the penetrating heat that steamed from the pores of the surrounding
+river bottoms.
+
+The rector of St. John's realized that a crisis had come in his life,--a
+crisis he had tried to stave off in vain. And yet there was a period
+during which he pursued his shrunken duties as though nothing had
+happened to him; as a man who has been struck in battle keeps on,
+loath to examine, to acknowledge the gravity of his wound; fearing to,
+perhaps. Sometimes, as his mind went back to the merciless conflict of
+his past, his experience at the law school, it was the unchaining of
+that other man he dreaded, the man he believed himself to have
+finally subdued. But night and day he was haunted by the sorrowful and
+reproachful face of Truth.
+
+Had he the courage, now, to submit the beliefs which had sustained him
+all these years to Truth's inexorable inspection? Did he dare to turn
+and open those books which she had inspired,--the new philosophies, the
+historical criticisms which he had neglected and condemned, which he
+had flattered himself he could do without,--and read of the fruit
+of Knowledge? Twice, thrice he had hesitated on the steps of the big
+library, and turned away with a wildly beating heart.
+
+Day by day the storm increased, until from a cloud on the horizon it
+grew into a soul-shaking tempest. Profoundly moved Parr's he had been
+on that Sunday afternoon, in Eldon Parr's garden, he had resolutely
+resolved to thrust the woman and the incident from his mind, to defer
+the consideration of the questions she had raised--grave though they
+were--to a calmer period. For now he was unable to separate her, to
+eliminate the emotion--he was forced to acknowledge--the thought of her
+aroused, from the problems themselves. Who was she? At moments he seemed
+to see her shining, accusing, as Truth herself, and again as a Circe
+who had drawn him by subtle arts from his wanderings, luring him to his
+death; or, at other times, as the mutinous daughter of revolt. But when
+he felt, in memory, the warm touch of her hand, the old wildness of his
+nature responded, he ceased to speculate or care, and he longed only to
+crush and subdue her by the brute power of the man in him. For good or
+bad, she had woven her spell.
+
+Here was the old, elemental, twofold contest, carnal and spiritual,
+thoroughly revived!...
+
+He recalled, in his musings, the little theological school surrounded
+by southern woods and fields, where he had sometime walked under autumn
+foliage with the elderly gentleman who had had such an influence on
+his life--the dean. Mild-mannered and frail, patient in ordinary
+converse,--a lion for the faith. He would have died for it as cheerfully
+as any martyr in history. By the marvels of that faith Holder had
+beheld, from his pew in the chapel, the little man transformed. He knew
+young men, their perplexities and temptations, and he dealt with them
+personally, like a father. Holder's doubts were stilled, he had gained
+power of his temptations and peace for his soul, and he had gone forth
+inspired by the reminder that there was no student of whom the dean
+expected better things. Where now were the thousands of which he had
+dreamed, and which he was to have brought into the Church?...
+
+Now, he asked himself, was it the dean, or the dean's theology through
+which his regeneration had come? Might not the inherent goodness of the
+dean be one thing, and his theology quite another? Personality again!
+He recalled one of the many things which Alison Parr had branded on his
+memory,--"the belief, the authority in which the man is clothed, and
+not the man!" The dean's God had remained silent on the subject of
+personality. Or, at the best, he had not encouraged it; and there
+were--Hodder could not but perceive--certain contradictions in his
+character, which were an anomalistic blending of that of the jealous God
+of Moses and of the God of Christ. There must be continuity--God could
+not change. Therefore the God of infinite love must retain the wrath
+which visited sins of the fathers on the children, which demanded
+sacrifice, atonement,--an exact propitiation for his anger against
+mankind. An innocent life of sorrow and suffering!
+
+And again, "You and your religion are as far apart as the poles!" Had
+he, Hodder, outgrown the dean's religion, or had it ever been his own?
+Was there, after all, such a thing as religion? Might it not be merely a
+figment of the fertile imagination of man? He did not escape the terror
+of this thought when he paused to consider his labour of the past two
+years and the vanity of its results. And little by little the feeling
+grew upon him, such being the state of his mind, that he ought not to
+continue, for the present at least, to conduct the services. Should he
+resign, or go away for a while to some quiet place before he made such
+a momentous decision? There was no one to whom he could turn; no layman,
+and no clergyman; not even the old bishop, whom he had more than once
+mentally accused of being, too broad and too tolerant! No, he did not
+wish a clergyman's solution. The significance of this thought flashed
+through him--that the world itself was no longer seeking clergymen's
+solutions. He must go off alone, and submit his faith to the impartial
+test.
+
+It was in a vigil of the night, when he lay in the hot darkness, unable
+to sleep, that he came at length to this resolve. And now that he had
+cut the knot he was too just to blame Alison Parr for having pointed
+out--with what often had seemed a pitiless cruelty--something of which
+he had had a constantly growing perception yet had continually sought to
+evade. And he reviewed, as the church bells recorded the silent hours,
+how, little by little, his confidence had crumbled before the shocks of
+the successive revelations--some of them so slight that they had
+passed unnoticed: comparisons, inevitably compelled; Dalton Street; the
+confessions of Eleanor Goodrich and Mrs. Constable; Mr. Plimpton and his
+views of life--Eldon Parr! Even the slamming of the carriage doors in
+Burton Street had had a significance!
+
+Might it not prove that this woman had let fall into the turbid waters
+of his soul the drop that was to clear them forever? He would go away.
+He would not see her again.
+
+Over the sleeping city, unapprehended, stole the dawn.
+
+He arose, but instead of falling on his knees he went to the window and
+lifted his face to the whitening sky.... Slowly out of the obscurity of
+the earth's shadow emerged the vague outlines of familiar things
+until they stood sharply material, in a silence as of death. A sparrow
+twittered, and suddenly the familiar, soot-grimed roofs were bathed in
+light, and by a touch made beautiful....
+
+Some hours later the city was wide awake. And Hodder, bathed and
+dressed, stood staring down from his study window into the street below,
+full now of young men and girls; some with set faces, hurrying, intent,
+others romping and laughing as they dodged the trucks and trolley cars;
+all on their way to the great shoe factory around the corner, the huge
+funnels of which were belching forth smoke into the morning air.
+The street emptied, a bell rang, a whistle blew, the hum of distant
+machinery began....
+
+
+
+II
+
+Later that morning Hodder sat in his study. The shutters were closed,
+and the intensity of the tropical glare without was softened and
+diffused by the slanting green slats. His eye wandered over the long and
+comfortable room which had been his sanctuary in the feverish days of
+his ministry, resting affectionately on the hospitable chairs, the wide
+fireplace before which he had been wont to settle himself on winter
+nights, and even on the green matting--a cooling note in summer. And
+there, in the low cases along the walls, were the rows of his precious
+books,--his one hobby and extravagance. He had grown to love the room.
+Would he ever come back to it?
+
+A step sounded in the hall, a knock, and the well-known gaunt form and
+spectacled face of McCrae appeared in the doorway.
+
+"Ye wished to see me?" he asked.
+
+"McCrae," said the rector, "I am going off for a while."
+
+His assistant regarded him a moment in silence. Although Hodder had no
+intention of explaining his reasons, he had a curious conviction that it
+were superfluous to do so, that McCrae had guessed them.
+
+"Why shouldn't ye? There's but a handful left to preach to in this
+weather."
+
+"I wouldn't go, in this sudden way, if it were not imperative," Hodder
+added, trying to speak calmly.
+
+"Why shouldn't ye?" McCrae repeated, almost fiercely.
+
+Hodder smiled in spite of himself.
+
+"There's no reason," he said, "except the added work put on you without
+warning, and in this heat."
+
+"Ye'll not need to worry," his assistant assured him, "the heat's
+nothing to me." McCrae hesitated, and then demanded abruptly, "Ye'll not
+be visiting?"
+
+The question took Hodder by surprise.
+
+"No," he answered quickly, and not quite steadily, and hesitated in his
+turn, "I shan't be visiting."
+
+"It's a rest ye need, I've been wanting to say it." McCrae took a step
+forward, and for a moment it seemed as though he were at last about
+to break the bonds of his reserve. Perhaps he detected an instinctive
+shrinking on the rector's part. At any rate, there was another instant
+of silence, in which the two men faced each other across the desk, and
+McCrae held out his hand. "Good luck to ye," he said, as Hodder took
+it, "and don't have the pariah on your mind. Stay till ye're rested, and
+come back to us."
+
+He left the room abruptly. Hodder remained motionless, looking after
+him, and then, moved apparently by a sudden impulse, started toward the
+door,--only to halt and turn before he got to it. Almost he had opened
+his lips to call his assistant back. He could not do it--the moment had
+come and fled when it might have been possible. Did this man hide, under
+his brusqueness and brevity of speech, the fund of wisdom and the wider
+sympathy and understanding he suspected? Hodder could have vouched for
+it, and yet he had kept his own counsel. And he was struck suddenly by
+the significance of the fact, often remarked, that McCrae in his brief
+and common-sense and by no means enlivening sermons had never once
+referred in any way to doctrine or dogma!
+
+He spent half an hour in collecting and bestowing in two large valises
+such articles as his simple needs would demand, and then set out for a
+railroad office in the business portion of the city, where he bought his
+ticket and berth. Then, after a moment of irresolution on the threshold
+of the place, he turned to the right, thrusting his way through the
+sluggish crowds on Tower Street until he came to the large bookstore
+where he had been want to spend, from time to time, some of his leisure
+moments. A clerk recognized him, and was about to lead the way to the
+rear, where the precious editions were kept, when Hodder stopped him.
+
+In casting about for a beginning in his venture over unknown seas, there
+had naturally come into his mind three or four works which were anathema
+to the orthodox; one of which, in seven volumes, went back to his
+seminary days, and had been the subject of a ringing, denunciatory
+sermon by the dean himself. Three of them were by Germans of established
+reputations, another by a professor of the University of Paris. The
+habit of years is strong.
+
+And though he knew that many clergymen read these books, Hodder found it
+impossible to overcome a nervous sense of adventure,--nay (knowing his
+resolution), of apostasy, almost of clandestine guilt when he mentioned
+them. And it seemed to him that the face of the clerk betrayed surprise.
+One of the works was not in stock; he would send the others that
+afternoon. Mr. Hodder would take them? They made a formidable parcel,
+but a little handle was supplied and the rector hurried out, swinging
+himself on a Tower Street car.
+
+It must not be thought that the whole of what is called modern criticism
+was new to Hodder. This would indeed be too much of a reflection on
+the open-mindedness of the seminary from which he had graduated. But
+he found himself, now, pondering a little cynically on that
+"open-mindedness"; on that concession--if it had been a concession--to
+the methods of science. There had been in truth a course of lectures on
+this subject; but he saw now, very clearly, what a concerted effort had
+been put forward in the rest of the teaching to minimize and discredit
+it. Even the professor who gave the lectures had had the air of
+deploring them. Here it is, but on the whole one would better let it
+alone,--such was the inference. And he had let it alone, through all
+these years.
+
+In the seminary, too, volumes by semi-learned clergymen had been thrust
+into his hands, efforts which Hodder recalled now, in spite of his
+mental state, with a smile. These invariably championed the doctrine
+of the virgin birth as the pillar on which the Incarnation depended. A
+favourite argument declared that although the Gospel texts in regard
+to it might be proven untrustworthy, the miraculous birth must have
+happened anyway! And one of these clerical authors whom he had more
+recently read, actually had had the audacity to turn the weapons of
+the archenemy, science, back upon itself. The virgin birth was an
+established fact in nature, and had its place in the social economy of
+the bee. And did not parthenogenesis occur in the silk moth?
+
+In brief, the conclusion impressed upon him by his seminary instruction
+was this: that historical criticism had corrected some ideas and put
+some things in their right place. What these things were remained
+sufficiently vague. But whenever it attacked a cherished dogma it was,
+on general principles, wrong.
+
+Once again in his cool study, he cut the cord with a trembling hand, and
+while he was eating the lunch his housekeeper had prepared, dipped into
+one of the larger volumes. As he read again the critical disproofs he
+felt an acute, almost physical pain, as though a vital part of him were
+being cut away, as his mind dwelt upon those beautiful legends to which
+he had so often turned, and which had seemed the very fountain of his
+faith. Legends!....
+
+He closed the book. The clock on the mantel struck three; his train was
+to leave at five. He rose and went down into the silent church he had
+grown to love, seating himself in one of the carved stalls of the choir,
+his eye lingering in turn on each beautiful object: on the glowing
+landscape in the window in memory of Eliza Parr, portraying the
+delectable country, with the bewildered yet enraptured faces of the
+pilgrims in the foreground; on the graceful, shining lectern, the
+aspiring arches, the carved marble altar behind the rail, and above it
+the painting of the Christ on the cross.
+
+The hours of greatest suffering are the empty hours. 'Eloi, Eloi, lama
+sabachthani?' The hours when the mysterious sustaining and driving force
+is withdrawn, and a lassitude and despair comes over us like that of
+a deserted child: the hours when we feel we have reached the limit of
+service, when our brief span of usefulness is done. Had God brought him,
+John Hodder, to the height of the powers of his manhood only to abandon
+him, to cast him adrift on the face of the waters--led him to this great
+parish, with all its opportunities, only that he might fail and flee?
+
+He sat staring at the face of the Man on the cross. Did he, in his
+overwrought state, imagine there an expression he had never before
+remarked, or had the unknown artist of the seventies actually risen
+above the mediocrity of the figure in his portrayal of the features of
+the Christ? The rector started, and stared again. There was no weakness
+in the face, no meekness, no suggestion of the conception of the
+sacrificed Lamb, no hint of a beatific vision of opening heavens--and
+yet no accusation, no despair. A knowing--that were nearer--a knowing of
+all things through the experiencing of all things, the suffering of all
+things. For suffering without revelation were vain, indeed! A perfected
+wisdom that blended inevitably with a transcendent love. Love and wisdom
+were one, then? To reach comprehension through conquering experience was
+to achieve the love that could exclaim, "they know not what they do!"
+
+Human or divine? Man or God? Hodder found himself inwardly repeating the
+words, the controversy which had raged for nineteen hundred years, and
+not yet was stilled. Perfection is divine. Human! Hodder repeated the
+word, as one groping on the threshold of a great discovery....
+
+
+
+III
+
+He was listening--he had for a long time been listening to a sound which
+had seemed only the natural accompaniment of the drama taking place in
+his soul, as though some inspired organist were expressing in exquisite
+music the undercurrent of his agony. Only gradually did he become aware
+that it arose from the nave of the church, and, turning, his eyes fell
+upon the bowed head and shoulders of a woman kneeling in one of the
+pews. She was sobbing.
+
+His movement, he recalled afterward, did not come of a conscious
+volition, as he rose and descended the chancel steps and walked toward
+her; he stood for what seemed a long time on the white marble of the
+aisle looking down on her, his heart wrung by the violence of her grief,
+which at moments swept through her like a tempest. She seemed still
+young, but poverty had marked her with unmistakable signs. The white,
+blue-veined hands that clung to the railing of the pew were thin; and
+the shirtwaist, though clean, was cheap and frayed. At last she rose
+from her knees and raised a tear-stained face to his, staring at him in
+a dumb bewilderment.
+
+"Can I do anything for you?" he said gently, "I am the rector here." She
+did not answer, but continued to stare uncomprehendingly. He sat down
+beside her in the pew.
+
+"You are in trouble," he said. "Will you let me try to help you?" A sob
+shook her--the beginning of a new paroxysm. He waited patiently until it
+was over. Suddenly she got rather wildly and unsteadily to her feet.
+
+"I must go!" she cried. "Oh, God, what would I do if--if he wasn't
+there?"
+
+Hodder rose too. She had thrust herself past him into the aisle, but if
+he had not taken her arm she would have fallen. Thus they went together
+to the door of the church, and out into the white, burning sunlight. In
+spite of her weakness she seemed actually to be leading him, impelled
+by a strange force and fled down the steps of the porch to the sidewalk.
+And there she paused, seeing him still beside her. Fortunately he had
+his hat in his hand.
+
+"Where are you going?" she asked.
+
+"To take you home," he replied firmly, "you ought not to go alone."
+
+A look of something like terror came into her eyes.
+
+"Oh, no!" she protested, with a vehemence that surprised him. "I am
+strong. Oh, thank you, sir,--but I can go alone. It's Dicky--my little
+boy. I've never left him so long. I had gone for the medicine and I saw
+the church. I used to go to church, sir, before we had our troubles--and
+I just went in. It suddenly came over me that God might help me--the
+doctor can do nothing."
+
+"I will go with you," he said.
+
+She ceased to resist, as one submitting to the fatality of a superior
+will.
+
+The pavements that afternoon, as Hodder and the forlorn woman left the
+cool porticoes of St. John's, were like the floor of a stone oven, and
+the work horses wore little bonnets over their heads. Keeping to the
+shady side, the rector and his companion crossed Tower Street with
+its trolley cars and its awninged stores, and came to that depressing
+district which had reproached him since the first Sunday of his
+ministry when he had traversed it with Eldon Parr. They passed the once
+prosperous houses, the corner saloons pandering to two vices, decked
+with the flamboyant signs of the breweries. The trees were dying along
+the asphalt and in the yards, the iron fences broken here and there, the
+copings stained with rust and soot. Hodder's thoughts might have been
+likened to the heated air that simmered above the bricks.
+
+They were in Dalton Street! She seemed to have forgotten his presence,
+her pace quickened as she turned into a gate and flew up a flight of
+dirty stone steps, broken and sagging. Hodder took in, subconsciously,
+that the house was a dingy grey, of three stories and a Mansard roof,
+with a bay window on the yard side, and a fly-blown sign, "Rooms to
+Rent" hanging in one window. Across the street, on a lot that had once
+held a similar dignified residence, was the yellow brick building of
+the "Albert Hotel," and next door, on the east, a remodelled house of
+"apartments" with speaking tubes in the doorway.
+
+The woman led him up another flight of steps to the open door of
+the house, through a hallway covered with a ragged carpet, where a
+dilapidated walnut hat-rack stood, up the stairs, threading a dark
+passage that led into a low-ceiled, stifling room at the very back.
+A stout, slatternly person in a wrapper rose as they entered, but the
+mother cast herself down beside the lounge where the child was. Hodder
+had a moment of fear that she was indeed too late, so still the boy lay,
+so pathetically wan was the little face and wasted the form under the
+cotton nightgown. The mother passed her hand across his forehead.
+
+"Dicky!" she whispered fearfully, "Dicky!"
+
+He opened his eyes and smiled at her; feebly.
+
+The stout woman, who had been looking on with that intensity of
+sympathy of which the poor are capable, began waving gently the
+palm-leaf fan. She was German.
+
+"He is so good, is Dicky. He smile at me when I fan him--once, twice. He
+complains not at all."
+
+The mother took the fan from her, hand.
+
+"Thank you for staying with him, Mrs. Breitmann. I was gone longer than
+I expected." The fact that the child still lived, that she was again in
+his presence, the absorbing act of caring for him seemed to have calmed
+her.
+
+"It is nothing, what I do," answered Mrs. Breitmann, and turned away
+reluctantly, the tears running on her cheeks. "When you go again, I come
+always, Mrs. Garvin. Ach!"
+
+Her exclamation was caused by the sight of the tall figure and black
+coat of the rector, and as she left the room, Mrs. Garvin turned. And he
+noticed in her eyes the same expression of dread they had held when she
+had protested against his coming.
+
+"Please don't think that I'm not thankful--" she faltered.
+
+"I am not offering you charity," he said. "Can you not take from other
+human beings what you have accepted from this woman who has just left?"
+
+"Oh, sir, it isn't that!" she cried, with a look of trust, of appeal
+that was new, "I would do anything--I will do anything. But my
+husband--he is so bitter against the church, against ministers! If he
+came home and found you here--"
+
+"I know--many people feel that way," he assented, "too many. But you
+cannot let a prejudice stand in the way of saving the boy's life, Mrs.
+Garvin."
+
+"It is more than that. If you knew, sir--"
+
+"Whatever it is," he interrupted, a little sternly, "it must not
+interfere. I will talk to your husband."
+
+She was silent, gazing at him now questioningly, yet with the dawning
+hope of one whose strength is all but gone, and who has found at last a
+stronger to lean upon.
+
+The rector took the fan from her arrested hand and began to ply it.
+
+"Listen, Mrs. Garvin. If you had come to the church half an hour later,
+I should have been leaving the city for a place far distant."
+
+"You were going away? You stayed on my account?"
+
+"I much prefer to stay, if I can be of any use, and I think I can. I am
+sure I can. What is the matter with the child?"
+
+"I don't know, sir--he just lies there listless and gets thinner and
+thinner and weaker and weaker. Sometimes he feels sick, but not often.
+The doctor don't seem to know."
+
+"What doctor have you?"
+
+"His name is Welling. He's around the corner."
+
+"Exactly," said the rector. "This is a case for Dr. Jarvis, who is the
+best child specialist in the city. He is a friend of mine, and I intend
+to send for him at once. And the boy must go to a hospital--"
+
+"Oh, I couldn't, sir."
+
+He had a poignant realization of the agony behind the cry. She breathed
+quickly through her parted lips, and from the yearning in her tired
+eyes--as she gazed at the poor little form--he averted his glance.
+
+"Now, Mrs. Garvin, you must be sensible," he said. "This is no place for
+a sick child. And it is such a nice little hospital, the one I have
+in mind, and so many children get well and strong there," he added,
+cheerfully.
+
+"He wouldn't hear of it." Hodder comprehended that she was referring to
+her husband. She added inconsequently: "If I let him go, and he never
+came back! Oh, I couldn't do it--I couldn't."
+
+He saw that it was the part of wisdom not to press her, to give her time
+to become accustomed to the idea. Come back--to what? His eye wandered
+about the room, that bespoke the last shifts of poverty, for he knew
+that none but the desperate were driven to these Dalton Street houses,
+once the dwellings of the well-to-do, and all the more pitiful for the
+contrast. The heated air reeked with the smell of stale cooking. There
+was a gas stove at one side, a linoleum-covered table in the centre,
+littered with bottles, plates, and pitchers, a bed and chairs which had
+known better days, new obviously bruised and battered by many enforced
+movings. In one corner was huddled a little group of toys.
+
+He was suddenly and guiltily aware that the woman had followed his
+glance.
+
+"We had them in Alder Street," she said. "We might have been there yet,
+if we hadn't been foolish. It's a pretty street, sir--perhaps you know
+it--you take the Fanshawe Avenue cars to Sherman Heights. The air is
+like the country there, and all the houses are new, and Dicky had a yard
+to play in, and he used to be so healthy and happy in it... We were
+rich then,--not what you'd call rich," she added apologetically, "but we
+owned a little home with six rooms, and my husband had a good place
+as bookkeeper in a grocery house, and every year for ten years we put
+something by, and the boy came. We never knew how well off we were,
+until it was taken away from us, I guess. And then Richard--he's my
+husband--put his savings into a company--he thought it was so safe, and
+we were to get eight per cent--and the company failed, and he fell sick
+and lost his place, and we had to sell the house, and since he got well
+again he's been going around trying for something else. Oh, he's tried
+so hard,--every day, and all day long. You wouldn't believe it, sir. And
+he's so proud. He got a job as porter, but he wasn't able to hold it--he
+wasn't strong enough. That was in April. It almost broke my heart to see
+him getting shabby--he used to look so tidy. And folks don't want you
+when you're shabby."...
+
+There sprang to Hodder's mind a sentence in a book he had recently read:
+"Our slums became filled with sick who need never have been sick; with
+derelicts who need never have been abandoned."
+
+Suddenly, out of the suffocating stillness of the afternoon a woman's
+voice was heard singing a concert-hall air, accompanied by a piano
+played with vigour and abandon. And Hodder, following the sound, looked
+out across the grimy yard--to a window in the apartment house opposite.
+
+"There's that girl again," said the mother, lifting her head. "She does
+sing nice, and play, poor thing! There was a time when I wouldn't have
+wanted to listen. But Dicky liked it so.... It's the very tune he loved.
+He don't seem to hear it now. He don't even ask for Mr. Bentley any
+more."
+
+"Mr. Bentley?" the rector repeated. The name was somehow familiar to
+him.
+
+The piano and the song ceased abruptly, with a bang.
+
+"He lives up the street here a way--the kindest old gentleman you ever
+saw. He always has candy in his pockets for the children, and it's a
+sight to see them follow him up and down the sidewalk. He takes them to
+the Park in the cars on Saturday afternoons. That was all Dicky could
+think about at first--would he be well enough to go with Mr. Bentley by
+Saturday? And he was forever asking me to tell Mr. Bentley he was sick.
+I saw the old gentleman on the street to-day, and I almost went up to
+him. But I hadn't the courage."
+
+The child moaned, stirred, and opened his eyes, gazing at them
+feverishly, yet without seeming comprehension. She bent over him,
+calling his name.... Hodder thrust the fan into her hand, and rose.
+
+"I am going to telephone Dr. Jarvis," he said, "and then I shall come
+back, in order to be here when he arrives."
+
+She looked up at him.
+
+"Oh, thank you, sir,--I guess it's for the best--"
+
+Her voice died away, and the rector, seeking for the cause, saw that
+a man had entered the room. He walked up to the couch and stood for
+a moment staring moodily at the child, while the woman watched him,
+transfixed.
+
+"Richard!" she said.
+
+He paid no attention to her. She turned to Hodder. "This is my husband,
+sir.... Richard, I went into the church--just for a moment--I--I
+couldn't help it, and this gentleman--the minister--came home with me.
+He wanted to--he thought I was sick. And now he's going out to get the
+best doctor in the city for Dicky."
+
+The man turned suddenly and confronted the rector.
+
+"Why don't you let him die, you and your church people?" he asked.
+"You've done your worst to kill him."
+
+The woman put her hand fearfully, imploringly on the man's arm.
+
+"Richard!" she whispered.
+
+But as Hodder glanced from the derelict beside him a wave of
+comprehension passed through him that swept him clean of indignation, of
+resentment. And this man had been prosperous and happy!
+
+"There is but one way to save the boy's life, Mr. Garvin," he said, "and
+that is to put him in charge of Dr. Jarvis."
+
+The man made no reply, but went over to the window, staring out into the
+yard. There was something vaguely ominous in his attitude. The rector
+watched him a moment, and then turned to the mother.
+
+"You must not lose hope," he told her.
+
+She looked at him with terror-stricken eyes that sought to be grateful.
+He had picked up his hat from a corner of the littered table, and
+started to leave, when Garvin, by a sudden movement, planted himself
+in the doorway. Whether he had been drinking, or whether he were merely
+crazed by misfortune and the hopeless search in the heat for employment,
+and by lack of proper nourishment, Hodder could not say. There was a
+light in his eyes like that in a wounded animal's; and although he was
+thin and slight, he had the concentrated power of desperation.
+
+"Say, what church do you come from?" he demanded.
+
+"From St. John's," said the rector.
+
+"Eldon Parr's church?"
+
+Hodder started, in spite of himself, at the name.
+
+"Mr. Parr is a member of the congregation."
+
+"Come off! He owns it and runs it, the same as he does everything else
+in this town. Maybe you don't think I read the Sunday papers. Say, I was
+respectable once, and had a good place. You wouldn't believe it, would
+you?"
+
+Hodder hesitated. There was obviously no way to pass the man except by
+using physical force.
+
+"If you have anything to say to me, Mr. Garvin, I shall be glad to
+talk to you later. You must not stop me now," he said with a touch of
+severity.
+
+"You'll listen to me, right here and now," cried Garvin. "If you think I
+am going to let Eldon Parr's minister, or any one else belonging to him,
+save that boy's life, you've got another guess comin'. That's all. I'd
+rather have him die--d'ye hear? I'd rather have him die."
+
+The woman behind them whimpered.... The name was ringing like a knell in
+Hodder's head--Eldon Parr! Coming, as it had, like a curse from the
+lips of this wretched, half-demented creature, it filled his soul with
+dismay. And the accusation had in it the profound ring of truth. He was
+Eldon Parr's minister, and it was Eldon Parr who stood between him and
+his opportunity.
+
+"Why do you speak of Mr. Parr?" he asked, though the question cost him a
+supreme effort.
+
+"Why do I speak of him? My God, because he ruined me. If it hadn't been
+for him, damn him, I'd have a home, and health and happiness to-day, and
+the boy would be well and strong instead of lying there with the life
+all but gone out of him. Eldon Parr did for me, and now he's murdered my
+son--that's why I mention him."
+
+In the sudden intensity of his feeling, Hodder seized Garvin by the
+arms--arms that were little more than skin and bone. The man might be
+crazed, he might be drunk: that he believed what he was saying there
+could be no question. He began to struggle violently, but the rector was
+strong.
+
+"Be still," he commanded. And suddenly, overcome less by the physical
+power than by the aspect of the clergyman, an expression of bewilderment
+came into his eyes, and he was quiet. Hodder dropped his arms. "I do not
+intend to go until I hear what you have to say. It would be useless, at
+any rate, since your child's life is at stake. Tell me how Mr. Parr has
+ruined you."
+
+Garvin stared at him, half in suspicion, half in amazement.
+
+"I guess you never knew of his ruining anybody, did you?" he demanded
+sullenly. "Well, I'll tell you all right, and you can go and tell him.
+He won't care much--he's used to it by this time, and he gets square
+with God by his churches and charities. Did you ever hear of a stock
+called Consolidated Tractions?"
+
+Consolidated Tractions! In contrast to the sordid misery and degradation
+of this last refuge of the desperate Hodder saw the lofty, panelled
+smoking room at Francis Ferguson's, and was listening again to Wallis
+Plimpton's cynical amusement as to how he and Everett Constable and
+Eldon Parr himself had "gat out" before the crash; "got out" with all
+the money of the wretch who now stood before him! His parishioners! his
+Christians! Oh God!
+
+The man was speaking in his shrill voice.
+
+"Well, I was a Traction sucker, all right, and I guess you wouldn't have
+to walk more than two blocks to find another in this neighbourhood. You
+think Eldon Parr's a big, noble man, don't you? You're proud to run his
+church, ain't you? You wouldn't believe there was a time when I thought
+he was a big man, when I was kind of proud to live in the same city with
+him. She'll tell you how I used to come home from the store and talk
+about him after supper, and hope that the kid there would grow up into
+a financier like Eldon Parr. The boys at the store talked about him:
+he sort of laid hold on our imaginations with the library he gave, and
+Elmwood Park, and the picture of the big organ in your church in
+the newspapers--and sometimes, Mary and me and the boy, in the baby
+carriage, on Sunday afternoons we used to walk around by his house, just
+to look at it. You couldn't have got me to believe that Eldon Parr would
+put his name to anything that wasn't straight.
+
+"Then Consolidated Tractions came along, with Parr's, name behind it.
+Everybody was talking about it, and how it was payin' eight per cent.
+from the start, and extra dividends and all, and what a marvel of
+finance it was. Before the kid came, as soon as I married her, we began
+to save up for him. We didn't go to the theatres or nothing. Well, I put
+it all, five thousand dollars, into Consolidated. She'll tell you how we
+sat up half the night after we got the first dividend talking about
+how we'd send the kid to college, and after we went to bed we
+couldn't sleep. It wasn't more than a year after that we began to hear
+things--and we couldn't sleep for sure, and the dividends stopped and
+the stock tumbled. Even then I wouldn't believe it of him, that he'd
+take poor people's money that way when he had more than he knew what to
+do with. I made up my mind if I went down to see him and told him about
+it, he'd make it right. I asked the boss for an hour off, and headed for
+the Parr building--I've been there as much as fifty times since--but he
+don't bother with small fry. The clerks laugh when they see me comin'...
+I got sick worryin', and when I was strong enough to be around they'd
+filled my job at the grocery, and it wasn't long before we had to move
+out of our little home in Alder Street. We've been movin' ever since,"
+he cried, and tears of weakness were in his eyes, "until we've come to
+this, and we'll have to get out of here in another week. God knows where
+we'll go then."
+
+Hodder shuddered.
+
+"Then I found out how he done it--from a lawyer. The lawyer laughed at
+me, too. Say, do you wonder I ain't got much use for your church people?
+Parr got a corporation lawyer named Langmaid--he's another one of your
+millionnaire crooks--to fix it up and get around the law and keep him
+out of jail. And then they had to settle with Tim Beatty for something
+like three hundred thousand. You know who Beatty is--he owns this
+city--his saloon's around here on Elm Street. All the crooks had to
+be squared. Say," he demanded aggressively, "are Parr and Langmaid any
+better than Beatty, or any of the hold-up men Beatty covers? There's a
+street-walker over there in those flats that's got a million times more
+chance to get to heaven--if there is any--than those financiers, as they
+call 'emselves--I ain't much on high finance, but I've got some respect
+for a second story man now--he takes some risks! I'll tell you what they
+did, they bought up the short car lines that didn't pay and sold 'em
+to themselves for fifty times as much as they were worth; and they got
+controlling interests in the big lines and leased 'em to themselves with
+dividends guaranteed as high as eighteen per cent. They capitalized the
+Consolidated for more millions than a little man like me can think of,
+and we handed 'em our money because we thought they were honest. We
+thought the men who listed the stock on the Exchange were honest. And
+when the crash came, they'd got away with the swag, like any common
+housebreakers. There were dummy directors, and a dummy president. Eldon
+Parr didn't have a share--sold out everything when she went over two
+hundred, but you bet he kept his stock in the leased lines, which
+guarantee more than they earn. He cleaned up five million, they say....
+My money--the money that might give that boy fresh air, and good doctors
+....Say, you believe in hell, don't you? You tell Eldon Parr to keep his
+charity,--he can't send any of it in here. And you'd better go back to
+that church of his and pray to keep his soul out of hell."...
+
+His voice, which had risen even to a higher pitch, fell silent. And all
+at once, without warning, Garvin sank, or rather tumbled upon the bed,
+sobbing in a way that was terrible to see. The wife stole across the
+room, sat down beside him, and laid her hand on his shoulder....
+
+In spite of the intensity of his own anguish, Hodder was conscious of
+a curious detachment; and for months afterward particular smells, the
+sight of a gasoline stove, a certain popular tune gave him a sharp
+twinge of pain. The acid distilling in his soul etched the scene, the
+sounds, the odours forever in his memory: a stale hot wind from the
+alley rattled the shutter-slats, and blew the door to; the child
+stirred; and above the strident, irregular weeping rose main, in
+ironical contrast, the piano and the voice across the yard. In that
+glimpse he had into the heart of life's terrible mystery he momentarily
+understood many things: he knew that behind the abandon of the woman's
+song was the same terror which reigned in the room in which he stood....
+
+There were voices in the passageway without, a woman saying in a German
+accent,--"It is here, sir."
+
+There was a knock at the door....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI. THE LOST PARISHIONER
+
+
+I
+
+Hodder opened the door. In the dingy passageway he perceived a tall
+figure which immediately turned out to be that of an old gentleman.
+In spite of the heat, he wore a long coat and an old-fashioned, high
+collar, a black tie, under which was exposed a triangle of immaculate,
+pleated linen. In one hand he held a gold-headed stick, a large tall hat
+of which the silk nap was a little rubbed, a string sustaining a parcel,
+the brown paper wrapping of which was soaked: in the other, a manila bag
+containing lemons.
+
+His head was bent forward a little, the high dome of it was bald,
+but the white hair clustered thickly behind the temples. The face was
+clean-shaven, the cheeks touched with red, the nose high and dominating,
+distinctly philanthropic. And the blue eyes rested on the clergyman with
+a benevolence unfeigned.
+
+"Good afternoon, sir," the old gentleman said; "I am told Mrs. Garvin
+lives here."
+
+Before the rector could reply Mrs. Garvin herself stood between them.
+
+"It's Mr. Bentley!" she exclaimed.
+
+"I fear I'm intruding, ma'am," he said. "But some of Dicky's little
+friends have just informed me that he is ill, and I have taken the
+liberty of calling to inquire."
+
+Mr. Bentley entered the room,--simple words to express that which was in
+some sort an event. He laid his parcels on the table, his hat and stick
+on a chair, and stood looking down in silence at the thin little form on
+the couch. Presently he turned.
+
+"I'm afraid he's very ill, ma'am," he said gently. "You have your own
+doctor, no doubt. But if you will permit me, as a friend, to make a
+suggestion, we have in the city one of the best child specialists in
+the United States, who is never weary of curing these little ones,--Dr.
+Jarvis, and I shall be happy to ask him to come and see Dicky."
+
+Mrs. Garvin glanced at Hodder, who came forward.
+
+"I was just about to telephone for Dr. Jarvis, Mr. Bentley, when you
+arrived. I am Mr. Hodder, of St. John's."
+
+"How do you do, sir?" The kindly eyes, alight with a gentle flame,
+rested upon the rugged figure of the rector. "I am glad that you, too,
+agree that Dr. Jarvis is advisable, Mr. Hodder."
+
+There was a sound from the bed. Garvin had got to his feet and was
+staring wildly, with reddened lids.
+
+"Are you Horace Bentley?" he demanded.
+
+"That is my name, sir," Mr. Bentley replied. His expression of surprise
+was only momentary. And in all his life Hodder had never beheld a
+greater contrast in human beings than between that gracious and courtly
+old man and the haggard, unkempt, unshaved, and starving outcast facing
+him. Something like a film came over Garvin's eyes.
+
+"He ruined you, too, twenty years back--Eldon Parr did for you, too.
+Oh, I know his record, I've followed his trail--he got all the Grantham
+stock that would have made you a millionnaire!"
+
+"Ah," replied Mr. Bentley, smiling to humour him, "that's something I
+have no wish to be, sir,--a millionaire." He met the frightened gaze of
+the wife. "Good day, ma'am. If you will allow me, I'll come to-morrow
+morning to learn what Dr. Jarvis will have had to say. Have courage,
+ma'am, have courage. You may have faith in Dr. Jarvis."
+
+The poor woman was incapable of speech. Mr. Bentley picked up his hat
+and stick.
+
+"I've taken the liberty of bringing Dicky a little ice and a few
+lemons." His eyes rested again on the couch by the window. Then he
+turned to Garvin, who stood mutely, staring. "Good evening, sir," he
+said. "We must look for the best."
+
+
+
+II
+
+They went down the stairs of the shabby and battered house, stairs
+by the side of which holes had been knocked through the faded
+wall-paper--scars of frequent movings. The sound and smell of frying
+came out of the open door of what once had been the parlour, and on the
+front steps a little girl darted past them with a pitcher of beer. When
+they reached the sidewalk Mr. Bentley halted.
+
+"If you were intending to telephone Dr. Jarvis, Mr. Hodder, there is a
+public station in the drug store just above here. I know that clergymen
+are busy persons, and I am passing it, if you are pressed for time."
+
+"My only concern is to get Jarvis here," said the rector. "If I may go
+with you--"
+
+Once again in the hot sunlight, reaction had set in. Hodder was suddenly
+unstrung, and the kindly old gentleman beside him seemed for the
+instant the only fixture in a chaotic universe. It was not until later
+reflection that he realized Mr. Bentley might, by an intuitive sympathy,
+a depth of understanding, have drained something of his state, since the
+incidents which followed were to be accounted for on no other grounds.
+In such elemental moments the frail conventions are swept away: Mr.
+Bentley, whoever he might be, was no longer a stranger; and it seemed
+wholly natural to be walking with him up the street, to hear him
+saying,--not with perfunctory politeness but in a tone that was itself
+an invitation,--"With pleasure, sir, we'll go together. And let us trust
+that the doctor will be at home."
+
+Nor did Hodder stop to wonder, then, why Mr. Bentley should have sought
+in his conversation to dissipate something of the hideous blackness of
+a tragedy which must have moved him profoundly. How fortunate, he
+declared, that they should have arrived before it was too late! For it
+was plain to be seen that these Garvins were good people who had been
+broken by adversity.... The boy had struck him particularly--a lovable,
+merry little fellow whose clothes, Mr. Bentley observed, were always
+neatly mended, betokening a mother with self-respect and character. He
+even spoke of Garvin: adversity, worry, the heat, constant brooding over
+a happier past and an uncertain future--was it surprising that the poor
+man's mind had become unhinged? They must make some plan for Garvin,
+said Mr. Bentley, get the man and his wife into the country for a while
+amongst kindly people. This might no doubt be arranged....
+
+"Here we are, sir."
+
+The familiar smell of drugs, the sound of the trickling water in the
+soda fountain roused Hodder to reality, to action, and he hurried into
+the telephone booth, fumbled in the dog-eared book, got Dr. Jarvis's
+number and called it. An eternity seemed to elapse before he had a
+reply, heard his coin jangling in the bog, recognized the voice of the
+great doctor's secretary. Yes, the doctor was in would he speak to Mr.
+Hodder, of St. John's?... An interval, during which Hodder was suddenly
+struck with this designation of himself. Was he still of St. John's,
+then? An aeon might have elapsed since he had walked down the white
+marble of its aisle toward the crouching figure in the pew. He was not
+that man, but another--and still Mr. Hodder, of St. John's.... Then he
+heard the specialist say, "Hello, Mr. Hodder, what can I do for you?"
+Heard his own voice in reply, explaining the case. Could the doctor
+find time? The doctor could: he was never too busy to attend to the
+poor,--though he did not say so: he would be there--by half-past six.
+The rector hung up the receiver, opened the door of the booth and mopped
+his brow, for the heat was stifling.
+
+"The doctor will go," he explained in answer to Mr. Bentley's inquiring
+look.
+
+"Now, sir," said the old gentleman, when they were out of the store,
+"we have done all that we can for the time being. I do not live far from
+here. Perhaps you would give me the pleasure of taking supper with me,
+if you have no other engagement."
+
+No other engagement! Not until then did Hodder remember his empty rooms
+in the parish house, and the train which was to have borne him away from
+all this already speeding northward. He accepted gratefully, nor did
+he pause to speculate upon the mystery by which the stream of his life
+seemed so suddenly to have been diverted. He had, indeed, no sense of
+mystery in the presence of this splendidly sane, serene old man, any
+more than the children who ran after him from the dingy yards and
+passages, calling his name, clinging to the skirts of his coat. These
+accepted him simply as an anomalous fact in their universe, grinned at
+his pleasantries, and held up grimy little hands for the kidney-shaped
+candy beans he drew forth from his capacious pockets. In the intervals
+he reminisced to the rector about the neighbourhood.
+
+"It seems but a short while ago when the trees met overhead--magnificent
+trees they were. The asphalt and the soot killed them. And there were
+fruit trees in that yard"--he pointed with his stick to a littered sun
+parched plot adjoining a battered mansion--"all pink and white with
+blossoms in the spring. Mr. Hadley lived there--one of our forgotten
+citizens. He is dead and gone now and his family scattered. That other
+house, where the boy lies, belonged to Mr. Villars, a relation of the
+Atterbury family, and I can recall very well a little girl with a pink
+sash and a white dress who used to come running out to meet me with
+flowers in her hands. Incredible as it may seem, she picked them in that
+yard. I thought of her as I went in, how fresh and happy she used to
+be, and what a different place this was for children then. She must have
+some of her own by this time."
+
+The character of the street had changed to what might be called
+shabby-genteel, and they stopped before a three-story brick house--one
+of a row--that showed signs of scrupulous care. The steps were newly
+scrubbed, the woodwork neatly painted.
+
+"This is where I live, sir," said Mr. Bentley, opening the door with a
+latchkey and leading the way into a high room on the right, darkened and
+cool, and filled with superb, old-fashioned rosewood furniture. It
+was fitted up as a library, with tall shelves reaching almost to the
+ceiling.
+
+An old negro appeared, dressed in a swallow-tailed coat. His hair was as
+white as his master's, and his face creased with age.
+
+"Sam," said Mr. Bentley, "I have brought home a gentleman for supper."
+
+"Yassah, Misteh Ho'ace. I was jest agwine to open up de blin's."
+
+He lifted the wire screens and flung back the shutters, beamed on
+the rector as he relieved him of his hat, and noiselessly retired.
+Curiosity, hitherto suppressed by more powerful feelings, awoke in
+Hodder speculations which ordinarily would have been aroused before:
+every object in the room bespoke gentility, was eloquent of a day
+when wealth was honoured and respected: photographs, daguerreotypes in
+old-fashioned frames bore evidence of friendships of the past, and over
+the marble mantel hung a portrait of a sweet-faced woman in the costume
+of the thirties, whose eyes reminded Hodder of Mr. Bentley's. Who was
+she?
+
+Hodder wondered. Presently he found himself before a photograph on the
+wall beyond, at which he had been staring unconsciously.
+
+"Ah, you recognize it," said Mr. Bentley.
+
+"St. John's!"
+
+"Yes," Mr. Bentley repeated, "St. John's." He smiled at Hodder's glance
+of bewilderment, and put his hand on the younger man's arm. "That
+picture was taken before you were born, sir, I venture to say--in 1869.
+I am very fond of it, for it gives the church in perspective, as you
+see. That was Mr. Gore's house"--he indicated a square, heavily corniced
+mansion--"where the hotel now stands, and that was his garden, next the
+church, where you see the trees above the wall."
+
+The rector turned again and looked at his host, who, was gazing at the
+picture thoughtfully.
+
+"I ought to have remembered," he said. "I have seen your name in the
+church records, sir, and I have heard Mr. Waring speak of you."
+
+"My dear Mr. Hodder, there is no reason why you should have known me. A
+great many years have passed since I was a parishioner of St. John's--a
+great many years."
+
+"But it was you," the rector began, uncertainly, and suddenly spoke with
+conviction, "it was you who chose the architect, who did more than other
+men to make the church what it is."
+
+"Whatever I may have done," replied Mr. Bentley, with simple dignity,
+"has brought its reward. To this day I have not ceased to derive
+pleasure from it, and often I go out of my way, through Burton Street,
+although the view is cramped. And sometimes," he added, with the hint of
+a twinkle in his eye, "I go in. This afternoon is not the first time I
+have seen you, Mr. Hodder."
+
+"But--?" said the rector. He stared at the other's face, and the
+question died on his lips.
+
+"You wonder why I am no longer a parishioner. The time came when I
+could not afford to be." There was no hint of reproach in his voice,
+of bitterness. He spoke regretfully, indeed, but as one stating an
+incontrovertible fact. "I lost my fortune, I could not keep my pew, so
+I deeded it back to the church. My old friends, Mrs. Dimock and Asa
+Waring, and others, too, were very kind. But I could not accept their
+hospitality."
+
+Hodder bowed his head in silence. What thundered indictment of the
+Church of Christ could have been as severe, as wholly condemning as
+these few words so dispassionately uttered by the man beside him?
+
+The old darky entered, and announced supper.
+
+Hodder had lost his way, yet a hand had been held out to him, and he
+seized it. With a sense of being led, psychically as well as physically,
+he followed Mr. Bentley into a large bedroom, where a high, four-posted
+bed lifted a pleated canopy toward the ceiling. And after he had washed
+his hands they entered a dining-room looking out upon a little yard
+in the rear, which had been transformed into a garden. Roses, morning
+glories, and nasturtiums were growing against the walls; a hose lay
+coiled upon the path; the bricks, baked during the day, were splashed
+with water; the leaves and petals were wet, and the acrid odour of moist
+earth, mingling with perfumes, penetrated the room. Hodder paused in the
+window.
+
+"Sam keeps our flowers alive," he heard Mr. Bentley say, "I don't know
+how."
+
+"I scrubs 'em, sah," said Sam. "Yassah, I washes 'em like chilluns."
+
+He found himself, at Mr. Bentley's request, asking grace, the old darky
+with reverently bent head standing behind his master; sitting down at
+a mahogany table that reflected like a mirror the few pieces of old
+silver, to a supper of beaten biscuits that burned one's fingers, of
+'broiled chicken and coffee, and sliced peaches and cream. Mr. Bentley
+was talking of other days--not so long gone by when the great city had
+been a village, or scarcely more. The furniture, it seemed, had come
+from his own house in what was called the Wilderness Road, not far from
+the river banks, over the site of which limited trains now rolled on
+their way eastward toward the northernmost of the city's bridges. He
+mentioned many names, some remembered, some forgotten, like his own;
+dwelt on pleasures and customs gone by forever.
+
+"A little while after I moved in here, I found that one old man could
+not fill the whole of this house, so I let the upper floors," he
+explained, smilingly. "Some day I must introduce you to my tenants, Mr.
+Hodder."
+
+By degrees, as Hodder listened, he became calm. Like a child, he found
+himself distracted, talking, asking questions: and the intervals grew
+longer between the recurrent surges of fear when the memory rose before
+him of the events of the day,--of the woman, the child, and the man:
+of Eldon Parr and this deed he had done; hinting, as it did, of closed
+chambers of other deeds yet to be opened, of countless, hidden miseries
+still to be revealed: when he heard once more the tortured voice of
+the banker, and the question: "How would you like to live in this
+house--alone?" In contrast, now he beheld the peace in the face of the
+man whose worldly goods Eldon Parr had taken, and whom he had driven out
+of the church. Surely, this man had found a solution!... What was it?
+
+Hodder thought of the child, of the verdict of Dr. Jarvis, but he
+lingered on, loth to leave,--if the truth be told--afraid to leave;
+drawing strength from his host's calm, wondering as to the source of it,
+as to the life which was its expression; longing, yet not presuming, to
+question. The twilight deepened, and the old darky lit a lamp and led
+the way back to the library.
+
+"Sam," said Mr. Bentley, "draw up the armchair for Mr. Hodder beside the
+window. It is cooler there."
+
+"I ought to go," Hodder said. "I ought to see how the child is. Jarvis
+will have been there by this time, and there may be necessaries--"
+
+"Jarvis will have attended to that," Mr. Bentley replied. "Sit down,
+Mr. Hodder. I am not sure that, for the present, we have not done all in
+this case that is humanly possible."
+
+"You mean," said the rector, "that they will accept nothing from me." It
+came from him, spontaneously, like a cry. He had not meant to say it. "I
+don't blame them. I don't blame them for losing their faith in God and
+man, in the Church. I ought to have seen it before, but I was blind,
+incredibly blind--until it struck me in the face. You saw it, sir, and
+you left a church from which the poor are thrust out, which refuses to
+heed the first precept of its Master."
+
+"I saw it," answered Mr. Bentley, "but I could do nothing. Perhaps you
+can do--something."
+
+"Ah!" Hodder exclaimed sharply, "why do you say that? The Church is
+paralyzed, chained. How can she reach these wretched people who are the
+victims of the ruthless individualism and greed of those who control
+her? You know--that man, Mr. Bentley." (Hodder could not bring himself
+to pronounce Eldon Parr's name.) "I had an affection for him, I pitied
+him, because he suffers--"
+
+"Yes," echoed Mr. Bentley, "he suffers."
+
+Hodder was momentarily arrested by the sadness of his tone.
+
+"But he doesn't know why he suffers--he cannot be made to see," the
+rector went on. "And he is making others suffer,--hideously, while
+he imagines himself a Christian. He is the Church to that miserable,
+hopeless wretch we saw to-day, and to hundreds of the same kind whom
+he has driven to desperation. And I--who am supposed to be the vicar of
+God--I am powerless. They have a contempt for me, a just contempt. They
+thrust me out of their doors, bid me to return and minister to their
+oppressors. You were right to leave, and I should have left long since."
+
+He had not spoken with violence, or with a lack of control. He seemed
+rather to have regained a mastery of himself, and felt as a man from
+whom the shackles have been struck, proclaiming his freedom. Mr.
+Bentley's eyes lighted in involuntary response as he gazed at the figure
+and face before him. He pressed his hands together.
+
+"If you will forgive a curiosity, Mr. Hodder, that is somewhat due to my
+interest in a church with which I have many precious associations, may I
+ask if this is a sudden determination on your part?"
+
+"No," Hodder said. "I have known ever since I came here that something
+was wrong, but at first I couldn't see it, and after that I wouldn't see
+it. That is about what happened, as I look back on it.
+
+"But the farther in I went," Hodder continued, "the more tangled
+and bewildered I became. I was hypnotized, I think," he added with
+a gesture,--"hypnotized, as a man is who never takes his eyes from a
+pattern. I wanted to get at this neighbourhood--Dalton Street--I mean,
+and finally I agreed to the establishment of a settlement house over
+here, to be paid for largely by Eldon Parr and Francis Ferguson. I
+couldn't see the folly of such an undertaking--the supreme irony of it,
+until--until it was pointed out to me." He hesitated; the remembrance of
+Alison Parr ran through him, a thread of pain. "And even then I tried to
+dodge the issue, I tried to make myself believe that good might flow out
+of evil; that the Church, which is supposed to be founded on the highest
+ideal ever presented to man, might compromise and be practical, that
+she might accept money which had been wrung from a trusting public
+by extortion, by thinly disguised thievery such as this Consolidated
+Tractions Company fraud, and do good with it! And at last I made up my
+mind to go away, to-day, to a quiet place where I might be alone, and
+reflect, when by a singular circumstance I was brought into contact
+with this man, Garvin. I see now, clearly enough, that if I had gone, I
+should never have come back."
+
+"And you still intend to go?" Mr. Bentley asked.
+
+Hodder leaned his elbow against the mantel. The lamplight had a curious
+effect on Mr. Bentley's face.
+
+"What can I do?" he demanded. The question was not aimed directly at his
+host--it was in the nature of a renewed appeal to a tribunal which
+had been mute, but with which he now seemed vaguely aware of a
+certain contact. "Even supposing I could bring myself to accept the
+compromise--now that I see it clearly, that the end justifies the
+means--what good could I accomplish? You saw what happened this
+afternoon--the man would have driven me out if, it hadn't been for you.
+This whole conception of charity is a crime against civilization--I
+had to have that pointed out to me, too,--this system of legalized or
+semi-legalized robbery and the distribution of largesse to the victims.
+The Church is doing wrong, is stultifying herself in encouraging it. She
+should set her face rigidly against it, stand for morality and justice
+and Christianity in government, not for pauperizing. It is her mission
+to enlighten these people, all people--to make them self-respecting,
+to give them some notion of the dignity of their souls and their rights
+before God and man."
+
+"Aren't you yourself suggesting," said Mr. Bentley, "the course which
+will permit you to remain?"
+
+Hodder was silent. The thought struck him with tremendous force. Had he
+suggested it? And how--why? Could it be done? Could he do it or begin
+it?
+
+"We have met at last in a singular way," he heard Mr. Bentley going on,
+"in a way that has brushed aside the conventions, in a way--I am happy
+to say--that has enabled you to give me your confidence. And I am an old
+man,--that has made it easier. I saw this afternoon, Mr. Hodder, that
+you were troubled, although you tried to hide it."
+
+"I knew that you saw it," Hodder said.
+
+"Nor was it difficult for me to guess something of the cause of it. The
+same thing has troubled me."
+
+"You?"
+
+"Yes," Mr. Bentley answered. "I left St. John's, but the habits and
+affections of a lifetime are not easily severed. And some time before
+I left it I began to have visions of a future for it. There was a
+question, many years ago, as to whether a new St. John's should not be
+built in the West End, on a site convenient to the parishioners, and
+this removal I opposed. Mr. Waring stood by me. We foresaw the day when
+this district would be--what it is now--the precarious refuge of the
+unfortunate in the battle of life, of just such unhappy families as the
+Garvins, of miserable women who sell themselves to keep alive. I thought
+of St. John's, as you did, as an oasis in a desert of misery and vice.
+At that time I, too, believed in the system of charities which you have
+so well characterized as pauperizing."
+
+"And now?"
+
+Mr. Bentley smiled, as at a reminiscence.
+
+"My eyes were opened," he replied, and in these simple words summed up
+and condemned it all. "They are craving bread, and we fling them atones.
+I came here. It was a house I owned, which I saved from the wrecks, and
+as I look back upon what the world would call a misfortune, sir, I can
+see that it was a propitious event, for me. The street 'ran down,'
+as the saying goes. I grew gradually to know these people, my new
+neighbours, largely through their children, and I perceived many things
+I had not dreamed of--before then. I saw how the Church was hampered,
+fettered; I saw why they disliked and distrusted it."
+
+"And yet you still believed that it had a mission?" Hodder interrupted.
+He had been listening with rapt attention.
+
+"I still believed it," said Mr. Bentley. "My conception of that mission
+changed, grew, and yet it seemed further and further from fulfilment.
+And then you came to St. John's."
+
+"I!" The cry was involuntary.
+
+"You," Mr. Bentley repeated. "Sometimes," he added whimsically, "I go
+there, as I have told you. I saw you, I heard you preach. I talked to
+my friend Waring about you. I saw that your eyes were not opened, but
+I think I had a certain presentiment, for which I do not pretend to
+account, that they would be opened."
+
+"You mean," said the rector, "that if I believe in the mission of the
+Church as I have partially stated it here tonight, I--should stay and
+fight for it."
+
+"Precisely," Mr. Bentley replied.
+
+There was a note of enthusiasm, almost of militancy in the old
+gentleman's tone that surprised and agitated Hodder. He took a turn up
+and down the room before he answered.
+
+"I ought to tell you that the view I expressed a moment ago is new to
+me. I had not thought of it before, and it is absolutely at variance
+with any previous ideas I have held. I can see that it must involve,
+if carried to its logical conclusion, a change in the conception of
+Christianity I have hitherto held."
+
+He was too intent upon following up the thought to notice Mr. Bentley's
+expression of assent.
+
+"And suppose," he asked, "I were unable to come to any conclusion? I
+will be frank, Mr. Bentley, and confess to you that at present I cannot
+see my way. You have heard me preach--you know what my beliefs have
+been. They are shattered. And, while I feel that there is some definite
+connection between the view of the Church which I mentioned and her
+message to the individual, I do not perceive it clearly. I am not
+prepared at present to be the advocate of Christianity, because I do not
+know what Christianity is. I thought I knew.
+
+"I shall have to begin all over again, as though I had never taken
+orders, submit to a thorough test, examine the evidence impartially. It
+is the only way. Of this much I am sure, that the Church as a whole
+has been engaged in a senseless conflict with science and progressive
+thought, that she has insisted upon the acceptance of facts which are in
+violation of reason and which have nothing to do with religion. She has
+taught them to me--made them, in fact, a part of me. I have clung to
+them as long as I can, and in throwing them over I don't know where I
+shall land."
+
+His voice was measured, his words chosen, yet they expressed a withering
+indignation and contempt which were plainly the culmination of months of
+bewilderment--now replaced by a clear-cut determination.
+
+"I do not blame any individual," he continued, "but the system by which
+clergymen are educated.
+
+"I intend to stay here, now, without conducting any services, and find
+out for myself what the conditions are here in Dalton Street. You know
+those people, Mr. Bentley, you understand them, and I am going to ask
+you to help me. You have evidently solved the problem."
+
+Mr. Bentley rose. And he laid a hand, which was not quite steady, on the
+rector's shoulder.
+
+"Believe me, sir," he replied, "I appreciate something of what such a
+course must mean to you--a clergyman." He paused, and a look came upon
+his face, a look that might scarce have been called a smile--Hodder
+remembered it as a glow--reminiscent of many things. In it a life was
+summed ups in it understanding, beneficence, charity, sympathy, were
+all expressed, yet seemingly blended into one. "I do not know what
+my testimony may be worth to you, my friend, but I give it freely. I
+sometimes think I have been peculiarly fortunate. But I have lived a
+great many years, and the older I get and the more I see of human
+nature the firmer has grown my conviction of its essential nobility and
+goodness."
+
+Hodder marvelled, and was silent.
+
+"You will come here, often,--every day if you can. There are many men
+and women, friends of mine, whom I should like you to know, who would
+like to know you."
+
+"I will, and thank you," Hodder answered. Words were inadequate for the
+occasion....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII. THE WOMAN OF THE SONG
+
+On leaving Mr. Bentley, Hodder went slowly down Dalton Street, wondering
+that mere contact with another human being should have given him the
+resolution to turn his face once again toward the house whither he was
+bound. And this man had given him something more. It might hardly have
+been called faith; a new courage to fare forth across the Unknown--that
+was it; hope, faint but revived.
+
+Presently he stopped on the sidewalk, looked around him, and read a sign
+in glaring, electric letters, Hotel Albert. Despite the heat, the place
+was ablaze with lights. Men and women were passing, pausing--going in. A
+motor, with a liveried chauffeur whom he remembered having seen before,
+was standing in front of the Rathskeller. The nightly carousal was
+beginning.
+
+Hodder retraced his steps, crossed the street diagonally, came to the
+dilapidated gate he remembered so well, and looked up through the dusk
+at the house. If death had entered it, there was no sign: death must be
+a frequent visitor hereabouts. On the doorsteps he saw figures outlined,
+slatternly women and men in shirt-sleeves who rose in silence to make
+way for him, staring at him curiously. He plunged into the hot darkness
+of the hall, groped his way up the stairs and through the passage, and
+hesitated. A single gas jet burned low in the stagnant air, and after
+a moment he made out, by its dim light, a woman on her knees beside the
+couch, mechanically moving the tattered palm-leaf over the motionless
+little figure. The child was still alive. He drew a deep breath, and
+entered; at the sound of his step Mrs. Garvin suddenly started up.
+
+"Richard!" she cried, and then stood staring at the rector. "Have you
+seen my husband, sir? He went away soon after you left."
+
+Hodder, taken by surprise, replied that he had not. Her tone, her
+gesture of anxiety he found vaguely disquieting.
+
+"The doctor has been here?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," she answered absently. "I don't know where he can be--Richard. He
+didn't even wait to see the doctor. And he thinks so much of Dicky, sir,
+he sits here of an evening--"
+
+Hodder sat down beside her, and taking the palm-leaf from her hand,
+began himself to fan the child. Something of her misgiving had
+communicated itself to him.
+
+"Don't worry," he said. "Remember that you have been through a great
+deal, and it is natural that you should be overwrought. Your husband
+feels strongly. I don't blame him. And the sight of me this afternoon
+upset him. He has gone out to walk."
+
+"Richard is proud," she answered simply. "He used to say he'd rather
+die than take charity--and now he's come to it. And it's--that man, sir,
+who's got on his brain, and changed him. He wasn't always like this, but
+now he can't seem to think of anything else. He wakes up in the night
+.... And he used to have such a sweet nature--you wouldn't have known
+him... and came home so happy in the evenings in Alder Street, often
+with a little fruit, or something he'd bought for us, and romp with
+Dicky in the yard, and I'd stand and laugh at them. Even after we'd lost
+our money, when he was sick that time, he didn't feel this way. It grew
+on him when he couldn't get work, and then he began to cut things out of
+the papers about Mr. Parr. And I have sometimes thought that that's kept
+him from getting work. He talks about it, and people don't know what
+to make of him. They don't know how hard he'd try if they'd give him
+something."....
+
+"We shall find something," said the rector, striving to throw into his
+voice confidence and calm. He did not dare to look at her, but continued
+to move the fan.
+
+The child stirred a little. Mrs. Garvin put out her hand.
+
+"Yes, the doctor was here. He was very kind. Oh, sir," she exclaimed,
+"I hope you won't think us ungrateful--and that Mr. Bentley won't. Dr.
+Jarvis has hopes, sir,--he says--I forget the name he called it, what
+Dicky has. It's something uncommon. He says it was--brought on by
+the heat, and want of food--good food. And he's coming himself in
+the morning to take him out to that hospital beyond the park--in an
+automobile, sir. I was just thinking what a pity it is Dicky wouldn't
+realize it. He's always wanted to ride in one." Suddenly her tears
+flowed, unheeded, and she clung to the little hand convulsively. "I
+don't know what I shall do without him, Sir, I don't.... I've always had
+him... and when he's sick, among strangers."...
+
+The rector rose to the occasion.
+
+"Now, Mrs. Garvin," he said firmly, "you must remember that there is
+only one way to save the boy's life. It will be easy to get you a room
+near the hospital, where you can see him constantly."
+
+"I know--I know, sir. But I couldn't leave his father, I couldn't leave
+Richard." She looked around distractedly. "Where is he?"
+
+"He will come back presently," said the rector. "If not, I will look for
+him."
+
+She did not reply, but continued to weep in silence. Suddenly, above the
+confused noises of the night, the loud notes of a piano broke, and the
+woman whose voice he had heard in the afternoon began once more with
+appalling vigour to sing. The child moaned.
+
+Mrs. Garvin started up hysterically.
+
+"I can't stand it--I can't stand her singing that now," she sobbed.
+
+Thirty feet away, across the yard, Hodder saw the gleaming window from
+which the music came. He got to his feet. Another verse began, with more
+of the brazen emphasis of the concert-hall singer than ever. He glanced
+at the woman beside him, irresolutely.
+
+"I'll speak to her," he said.
+
+Mrs. Garvin did not appear to hear him, but flung herself down beside
+the lounge. As he seized his hat and left the room he had the idea of
+telephoning for a nurse, when he almost ran into some one in the upper
+hall, and recognized the stout German woman, Mrs. Breitmann.
+
+"Mrs. Garvin"--he said, "she ought not to be left--"
+
+"I am just now going," said Mrs. Breitmann. "I stay with her until her
+husband come."
+
+Such was the confidence with which, for some reason, she inspired him,
+that he left with an easier mind.
+
+It was not until the rector had arrived at the vestibule of the
+apartment house next door that something--of the difficulty and delicacy
+of the errand he had undertaken came home to him. Impulse had brought
+him thus far, but now he stood staring helplessly at a row of bells,
+speaking tubes, and cards. Which, for example, belonged to the lady
+whose soprano voice pervaded the neighbourhood? He looked up and down
+the street, in the vain hope of finding a messenger. The song continued:
+he had promised to stop it. Hodder accused himself of cowardice.
+
+To his horror, Hodder felt stealing over him, incredible though it
+seemed after the depths through which he had passed, a faint sense
+of fascination in the adventure. It was this that appalled him--this
+tenacity of the flesh,--which no terrors seemed adequate to drive out.
+The sensation, faint as it was, unmanned him. There were still many
+unexplored corners in his soul.
+
+He turned, once more contemplated the bells, and it was not until
+then he noticed that the door was ajar. He pushed it open, climbed the
+staircase, and stood in the doorway of what might be called a sitting
+room, his eyes fixed on a swaying back before an upright piano against
+the wall; his heart seemed to throb with the boisterous beat of the
+music. The woman's hair, in two long and heavy plaits falling below her
+waist, suddenly fascinated him. It was of the rarest of russet reds. She
+came abruptly to the end of the song.
+
+"I beg your pardon--" he began.
+
+She swung about with a start, her music dropping to the floor, and
+stared at him. Her tattered blue kimono fell away at her elbows, her
+full throat was bare, and a slipper she had kicked off lay on the floor
+beside her. He recoiled a little, breathing deeply. She stared at him.
+
+"My God, how you scared me!" she exclaimed. Evidently a second glance
+brought to her a realization of his clerical costume. "Say, how did you
+get in here?"
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said again, "but there is a very sick child in
+the house next door and I came to ask you if you would mind not playing
+any more to-night."
+
+She did not reply at once, and her expression he found unsolvable. Much
+of it might be traced to a life which had contracted the habit of taking
+nothing on trust, a life which betrayed itself in unmistakable traces
+about the eyes. And Hodder perceived that the face, if the stamp of
+this expression could have been removed, was not unpleasing, although
+indulgence and recklessness were beginning to remould it.
+
+"Quit stringin' me," she said.
+
+For a moment he was at a loss. He gathered that she did not believe him,
+and crossed to the open window.
+
+"If you will come here," he said, "I will show you the room where he
+lies. We hope to be able to take him to the hospital to-morrow." He
+paused a moment, and added: "He enjoyed your music very much when he was
+better."
+
+The comment proved a touchstone.
+
+"Say," she remarked, with a smile that revealed a set of surprisingly
+good teeth, "I can make the box talk when I get a-goin'. There's no
+stopping me this side of grand opera,--that's no fable. I'm not so bad
+for an enginoo, am I?"
+
+Thus directly appealed to, in common courtesy he assented.
+
+"No indeed," he said.
+
+"That's right," she declared. "But the managers won't have it at any
+price. Those jays don't know anything, do they? They've only got a dream
+of what the public wants. You wouldn't believe it, but I've sung for
+'em, and they threw me out. You wouldn't believe it, would you?"
+
+"I must own," said the rector, "that I have never had any experience
+with managers."
+
+She sat still considering him from the piano stool, her knees apart, her
+hands folded in her lap. Mockery came into her eyes.
+
+"Say, what did you come in here for, honest injun?" she demanded.
+
+He was aware of trying to speak sternly, and of failing. To save his
+life he could not, then, bring up before himself the scene in the little
+back room across the yard in its full terror and reality, reproduce his
+own feelings of only a few minutes ago which had impelled him hither. A
+month, a year might have elapsed. Every faculty was now centred on the
+woman in front of him, and on her life.
+
+"Why do you doubt me?" he asked.
+
+She continued to contemplate him. Her eyes were strange, baffling,
+smouldering, yellow-brown, shifting, yet not shifty: eyes with a
+history. Her laugh proclaimed both effrontery and uneasiness.
+
+"Don't get huffy," she said. "The kid's sick--that's on the level, is
+it? You didn't come 'round to see me?" The insinuation was in her voice
+as well as in her words. He did not resent it, but felt an odd thrill of
+commingled pity and--fear.
+
+"I came for the reason I have given you," he replied; and added, more
+gently: "I know it is a good deal to ask, but you will be doing a great
+kindness. The mother is distracted. The child, as I told you, will be
+taken to the hospital in the morning."
+
+She reached out a hand and closed the piano softly.
+
+"I guess I can hold off for to-night," she said. "Sometimes things get
+kind of dull--you know, when there's nothing doing, and this keeps me
+lively. How old is the kid?"
+
+"About nine," he estimated.
+
+"Say, I'm sorry." She spoke with a genuineness of feeling that surprised
+him. He went slowly, almost apologetically toward the door.
+
+"Good night," he said, "and thank you."
+
+Her look halted him.
+
+"What's your hurry?" she demanded.
+
+"I'm sorry," he said hastily, "but I must be going." He was, in truth,
+in a panic to leave.
+
+"You're a minister, ain't you?"
+
+"Yes," he said.
+
+"I guess you don't think much of me, do you?" she demanded.
+
+He halted abruptly, struck by the challenge, and he saw that this woman
+had spoken not for herself, but for an entire outlawed and desperate
+class. The fact that the words were mocking and brazen made no
+difference; it would have been odd had they not been so. With a shock of
+surprise he suddenly remembered that his inability to reach this
+class had been one of the causes of his despair! And now? With the
+realization, reaction set in, an overpowering feeling of weariness, a
+desire--for rest--for sleep. The electric light beside the piano danced
+before his eyes, yet he heard within him a voice crying out to him to
+stay. Desperately tired though he was, he must not leave now. He walked
+slowly to the table, put his hat on it and sat down in a chair beside
+it.
+
+"Why do you say that?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, cut it out!" said the woman. "I'm on to you church folks." She
+laughed. "One of 'em came in here once, and wanted to pray. I made a
+monkey of him."
+
+"I hope," said the rector, smiling a little, "that is not the reason why
+you wish me to stay."
+
+She regarded him doubtfully.
+
+"You're not the same sort," she announced at length.
+
+"What sort was he?"
+
+"He was easy,--old enough to know better--most of the easy ones are. He
+marched in sanctimonious as you please, with his mouth full of salvation
+and Bible verses." She laughed again at the recollection.
+
+"And after that," said the rector, "you felt that ministers were a lot
+of hypocrites."
+
+"I never had much opinion of 'em," she admitted, "nor of church people,
+either," she added, with emphasis.
+
+"There's Ferguson, who has the department store,--he's 'way up' in
+church circles. I saw him a couple of months ago, one Sunday morning,
+driving to that church on Burton Street, where all the rich folks go. I
+forget the name--"
+
+"St. John's," he supplied. He had got beyond surprise.
+
+"St. John's--that's it. They tell me he gives a lot of money to
+it--money that he steals from the girls he hires. Oh, yes, he'll get to
+heaven--I don't think."
+
+"How do you mean that he steals money from the girls?"
+
+"Say, you are innocent--ain't you! Did you ever go down to that store?
+Do you know what a floorwalker is? Did you ever see the cheap guys
+hanging around, and the young swells waiting to get a chance at the
+girls behind the counters? Why do you suppose so many of 'em take to the
+easy life? I'll put you next--because Ferguson don't pay 'em enough to
+live on. That's why. He makes 'em sign a paper, when he hires 'em, that
+they live at home, that they've got some place to eat and sleep, and
+they sign it all right. That's to square up Ferguson's conscience. But
+say, if you think a girl can support herself in this city and dress on
+what he pays, you've got another guess comin'."
+
+There rose up before him, unsummoned, the image of Nan Ferguson, in all
+her freshness and innocence, as she had stood beside him on the porch
+in Park Street. He was somewhat astonished to find himself defending his
+parishioner.
+
+"May it not be true, in order to compete with other department stores,
+that Mr. Ferguson has to pay the same wages?" he said.
+
+"Forget it. I guess you know what Galt House is? That's where women like
+me can go when we get all played out and there's nothing left in the
+game--it's on River Street. Maybe you've been there."
+
+Hodder nodded.
+
+"Well," she continued, "Ferguson pays a lot of money to keep that going,
+and gets his name in the papers. He hands over to the hospitals where
+some of us die--and it's all advertised. He forks out to the church.
+Now, I put it to you, why don't he sink some of that money where it
+belongs--in living wages? Because there's nothing in it for him--that's
+why."
+
+The rector looked at her in silence. He had not suspected her of so much
+intellect. He glanced about the apartment, at the cheap portiere flung
+over the sofa; at the gaudy sofa cushions, two of which bore the names
+and colours of certain colleges. The gas log was almost hidden by dried
+palm leaves, a cigarette stump lay on the fender; on the mantel above
+were several photographs of men and at the other side an open door
+revealed a bedroom.
+
+"This is a nice place, ain't it?" she observed. "I furnished it when I
+was on velvet--nothing was too good for me. Money's like champagne when
+you take the cork out, it won't keep. I was rich once. It was lively
+while it lasted," she added, with a sigh: "I've struck the down trail.
+I oughtn't, by rights, to be here fooling with you. There's nothing in
+it." She glanced at the clock. "I ought to get busy."
+
+As the realization of her meaning came to him, he quivered.
+
+"Is there no way but that?" he asked, in a low voice.
+
+"Say, you're not a-goin' to preach, are you?"
+
+"No," he answered, "God forbid! I was not asking the question of you."
+
+She stared at him.
+
+"Of who, then?"
+
+He was silent.
+
+"You've left me at the station. But on the level, you don't seem to know
+much, that's a fact. You don't think the man who owns these flats is in
+it for charity, do you? 'Single ladies,' like me, have to give up. And
+then there are other little grafts that wouldn't interest you. What
+church do you come from anyway?"
+
+"You mentioned it a little while ago."
+
+"St. John's!" She leaned back against the piano and laughed
+unrestrainedly. "That's a good one, to think how straight I've been
+talking to you."
+
+"I'm much obliged to you," he said.
+
+Again she gazed at him, now plainly perplexed.
+
+"What are you giving me?"
+
+"I mean what I say," he answered. "I am obliged to you for telling me
+things I didn't know. And I appreciate--your asking me to stay."
+
+She was sitting upright now, her expression changed, her breath came
+more rapidly, her lips parted as she gazed at him.
+
+"Do you know," she said, "I haven't had anybody speak to me like that
+for four years." Her voice betrayed excitement, and differed in tone,
+and she had cast off unconsciously the vulgarity of speech. At that
+moment she seemed reminiscent of what she must once have been; and he
+found himself going through an effort at reconstruction.
+
+"Like what?" he asked.
+
+"Like a woman," she answered vehemently.
+
+"My name is John Hodder," he said, "and I live in the parish house, next
+door to the church. I should like to be your friend, if you will let me.
+If I can be of any help to you now, or at any other time, I shall feel
+happy. I promise not to preach," he added.
+
+She got up abruptly, and went to the window. And when she turned to him
+again, it was with something of the old bravado.
+
+"You'd better leave me alone, I'm no good;" she said. "I'm much obliged
+to you, but I don't want any charity or probation houses in mine. And
+honest work's a thing of the past for me--even if I could get a job.
+Nobody would have me. But if they would, I couldn't work any more.
+I've got out of the hang of it." With a swift and decisive movement she
+crossed the room, opened a cabinet on the wall, revealing a bottle and
+glasses.
+
+"So you're bent upon going--downhill?" he said.
+
+"What can you do to stop it?" she retorted defiantly, "Give me
+religion---I guess you'd tell me. Religion's all right for those on top,
+but say, it would be a joke if I got it. There ain't any danger. But if
+I did, it wouldn't pay room-rent and board."
+
+He sat mute. Once more the truth overwhelmed, the folly of his former
+optimism arose to mock him. What he beheld now, in its true aspect, was
+a disease of that civilization he had championed...
+
+She took the bottle from the cupboard and laid it on the table.
+
+"What's the difference?" she demanded. "It's all over in a little while,
+anyway. I guess you'd tell me there was a hell. But if that's so, some
+of your church folks'll broil, too. I'll take my chance on it, if they
+will." She looked at him, half in defiance, half in friendliness, across
+the table. "Say, you mean all right, but you're only wastin' time here.
+You can't do me any good, I tell you, and I've got to get busy."
+
+"May we not at least remain friends?" he asked, after a moment.
+
+Her laugh was a little harsh.
+
+"What kind of friendship would that be? You, a minister, and me a woman
+on the town?"
+
+"If I can stand it, I should think you might."
+
+"Well, I can't stand it," she answered.
+
+He got up, and held out his hand. She stood seemingly irresolute, and
+then took it.
+
+"Good night," he said.
+
+"Good night," she repeated nonchalantly.
+
+As he went out of the door she called after him:
+
+"Don't be afraid I'll worry the kid!"
+
+The stale odour of cigarette smoke with which the dim corridor was
+charged intoxicated, threatened to overpower him. It seemed to be the
+reek of evil itself. A closing door had a sinister meaning. He hurried;
+obscurity reigned below, the light in the lower hall being out; fumbled
+for the door-knob, and once in the street took a deep breath and mopped
+his brow; but he had not proceeded half a block before he hesitated,
+retraced his steps, reentered the vestibule, and stooped to peer at the
+cards under the speaking tubes. Cheaply printed in large script, was the
+name of the tenant of the second floor rear,--MISS KATE MARCY....
+
+In crossing Tower Street he was frightened by the sharp clanging of a
+great electric car that roared past him, aflame with light. His brain
+had seemingly ceased to work, and he stumbled at the curb, for he was
+very tired. The events of the day no longer differentiated themselves
+in his mind but lay, a composite weight, upon his heart. At length he
+reached the silent parish house, climbed the stairs and searched in his
+pocket for the key of his rooms. The lock yielded, but while feeling for
+the switch he tripped and almost fell over an obstruction on the floor.
+
+The flooding light revealed his travelling-bags, as he had piled them,
+packed and ready to go to the station.
+
+
+
+
+Volume 4.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII. WINTERBOURNE
+
+
+I
+
+Hodder fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, awaking during the night at
+occasional intervals to recall chimerical dreams in which the events
+of the day before were reflected, but caricatured and distorted. Alison
+Parr was talking to the woman in the flat, and both were changed, and
+yet he identified both: and on another occasion he saw a familiar figure
+surrounded by romping, ragged children--a figure which turned out to be
+Eldon Parr's!
+
+Finally he was aroused by what seemed a summons from the unknown--the
+prolonged morning whistle of the shoe factory. For a while he lay as one
+benumbed, and the gradual realization that ensued might be likened to
+the straining of stiffened wounds. Little by little he reconstructed,
+until the process became unbearable, and then rose from his bed with one
+object in mind,--to go to Horace Bentley. At first--he seized upon the
+excuse that Mr. Bentley would wish to hear the verdict of Dr. Jarvis,
+but immediately abandoned it as dishonest, acknowledging the true
+reason, that in all the--world the presence of this one man alone might
+assuage in some degree the terror in his soul. For the first time in his
+life, since childhood, he knew a sense of utter dependence upon another
+human being. He felt no shame, would make no explanation for his early
+visit.
+
+He turned up Tower, deliberately avoiding Dalton Street in its lower
+part, reached Mr. Bentley's door. The wrinkled, hospitable old darky
+actually seemed to radiate something of the personality with which he
+had so long been associated, and Hodder was conscious of a surge of
+relief, a return of confidence at sight of him. Yes, Mr. Bentley was at
+home, in the dining room. The rector said he would wait, and not disturb
+him.
+
+"He done tole me to bring you out, sah, if you come," said Sam.
+
+"He expects me?" exclaimed Hodder, with a shock of surprise.
+
+"That's what he done tole me, sah, to ax you kindly for to step out when
+you come."
+
+The sun was beginning to penetrate into the little back yard, where the
+flowers were still glistening with the drops of their morning bath; and
+Mr. Bentley sat by the window reading his newspaper, his spectacles on
+his nose, and a great grey cat rubbing herself against his legs. He rose
+with alacrity.
+
+"Good morning, sir," he said, and his welcome implied that early morning
+visits were the most common and natural of occurrences. "Sam, a plate
+for Mr. Hodder. I was just hoping you would come and tell me what Dr.
+Jarvis had said about the case."
+
+But Hodder was not deceived. He believed that Mr. Bentley understood
+perfectly why he had come, and the knowledge of the old gentleman's
+comprehension curiously added to his sense of refuge. He found himself
+seated once more at the mahogany table, permitting Sam to fill his cup
+with coffee.
+
+"Jarvis has given a favourable report, and he is coming this morning
+himself, in an automobile, to take the boy out to the hospital."
+
+"That is like Jarvis," was Mr. Bentley's comment. "We will go there,
+together, after breakfast, if convenient for you," he added.
+
+"I hoped you would," replied the rector. "And I was going to ask you
+a favour. I have a check, given me by a young lady to use at my
+discretion, and it occurred to me that Garvin might be willing to accept
+some proposal from you." He thought of Nan Ferguson, and of the hope he
+lead expressed of finding some one in Dalton Street.
+
+"I have been considering the matter," Mr. Bentley said. "I have a friend
+who lives on the trolley line a little beyond the hospital, a widow. It
+is like the country there, you know, and I think Mrs. Bledsoe could be
+induced to take the Garvins. And then something can be arranged for him.
+I will find an opportunity to speak to him this morning."
+
+Hodder sipped his coffee, and looked out at the morning-glories opening
+to the sun.
+
+"Mrs. Garvin was alone last night. He had gone out shortly after we
+left, and had not waited for the doctor. She was greatly worried."
+
+Hodder found himself discussing these matters on which, an hour before,
+he had feared to permit his mind to dwell. And presently, not without
+feeling, but in a manner eliminating all account of his personal
+emotions, he was relating that climactic episode of the woman at the
+piano. The old gentleman listened intently, and in silence.
+
+"Yes," he said, when the rector had finished, "that is my observation.
+Most of them are driven to the life, and held in it, of course, by a
+remorseless civilization. Individuals may be culpable, Mr. Hodder--are
+culpable. But we cannot put the whole responsibility on individuals."
+
+"No," Hodder assented, "I can see that now." He paused a moment, and as
+his mind dwelt upon the scene and he saw again the woman standing before
+him in bravado, the whole terrible meaning of her life and end flashed
+through him as one poignant sensation. Her dauntless determination to
+accept the consequence of her acts, her willingness to look her future
+in the face, cried out to him in challenge.
+
+"She refused unconditionally," he said.
+
+Mr. Bentley seemed to read his thought, divine his appeal.
+
+"We must wait," he answered.
+
+"Do you think?--" Hodder began, and stopped abruptly.
+
+"I remember another case, somewhat similar," said Mr. Bentley. "This
+woman, too, had the spirit you describe--we could do nothing with
+her. We kept an eye on her--or rather Sally Grover did--she deserves
+credit--and finally an occasion presented itself."
+
+"And the woman you speak of was--rehabilitated?" Hodder asked. He
+avoided the word "saved."
+
+"Yes, sir. It was one of the fortunate cases. There are others which are
+not so fortunate."
+
+Hodder nodded.
+
+"We are beginning to recognize that we are dealing, in, many instances,
+with a disease," Mr. Bentley went on. "I am far from saying that it
+cannot be cured, but sometimes we are forced to admit that the cure is
+not within our power, Mr. Hodder."
+
+Two thoughts struck the rector simultaneously, the revelation of what
+might be called a modern enlightenment in one of Mr. Bentley's age,
+an indication of uninterrupted growth, of the sense of continued youth
+which had impressed him from the beginning; and, secondly, an intimation
+from the use of the plural pronoun we, of an association of workers
+(informal, undoubtedly) behind Mr. Bentley. While he was engaged in
+these speculations the door opened.
+
+"Heah's Miss Sally, Marse Ho'ace," said Sam.
+
+"Good morning, Sally," said Mr. Bentley, rising from the table with his
+customary courtesy, "I'm glad you came in. Let me introduce Mr. Hodder,
+of St. John's."
+
+Miss Grover had capability written all over her. She was a young woman
+of thirty, slim to spareness, simply dressed in a shirtwaist and a
+dark blue skirt; alert, so distinctly American in type as to give a
+suggestion of the Indian. Her quick, deep-set eyes searched Hodder's
+face as she jerked his hand; but her greeting was cordial, and,
+matter-of-fact. She stimulated curiosity.
+
+"Well, Sally, what's the news?" Mr. Bentley asked.
+
+"Gratz, the cabinet-maker, was on the rampage again, Mr. Bentley. His
+wife was here yesterday when I got home from work, and I went over with
+her. He was in a beastly state, and all the niggers and children in the
+neighbourhood, including his own, around the shop. Fusel oil, labelled
+whiskey," she explained, succinctly.
+
+"What did you do?"
+
+"Took the bottle away from him," said Miss Grower. The simplicity of
+this method, Holder thought, was undeniable. "Stayed there until he came
+to. Then I reckon I scared him some."
+
+"How?" Mr. Bentley smiled.
+
+"I told him he'd have to see you. He'd rather serve three months than
+do that--said so. I reckon he would, too," she declared grimly. "He's
+better than he was last year, I think." She thrust her hand in the
+pocket of her skirt and produced some bills and silver, which she
+counted. "Here's three thirty-five from Sue Brady. I told her she hadn't
+any business bothering you, but she swears she'd spend it."
+
+"That was wrong, Sally."
+
+Miss Grower tossed her head.
+
+"Oh, she knew I'd take it, well enough."
+
+"I imagine she did," Mr. Bentley replied, and his eyes twinkled. He rose
+and led the way into the library, where he opened his desk, produced a
+ledger, and wrote down the amount in a fine hand.
+
+"Susan Brady, three dollars and thirty-five cents. I'll put it in the
+savings bank to-day. That makes twenty-two dollars and forty cents for
+Sue. She's growing rich."
+
+"Some man'll get it," said Sally.
+
+"Sally," said Mr. Bentley, turning in his chair, "Mr. Holder's been
+telling me about a rather unusual woman in that apartment house just
+above Fourteenth Street, on the south side of Dalton."
+
+"I think I know her--by sight," Sally corrected herself. She appealed.
+to Holder. "Red hair, and lots of it--I suppose a man would call it
+auburn. She must have been something of a beauty, once."
+
+The rector assented, in some astonishment.
+
+"Couldn't do anything with her, could you? I reckoned not. I've noticed
+her up and down Dalton Street at night."
+
+Holder was no longer deceived by her matter-of-fact tone.
+
+"I'll tell you what, Mr. Holder," she went on, energetically, "there's
+not a particle of use running after those people, and the sooner you
+find it out the less worry and trouble you give yourself."
+
+"Mr. Holder didn't run after her, Sally," said Mr. Bentley, in gentle
+reproof.
+
+Holder smiled.
+
+"Well," said Miss Grower, "I've had my eye on her. She has a
+history--most of 'em have. But this one's out of the common. When
+they're brazen like that, and have had good looks, you can nearly always
+tell. You've got to wait for something to happen, and trust to luck
+to be on the spot, or near it. It's a toss-up, of course. One thing is
+sure, you can't make friends with that kind if they get a notion you're
+up to anything."
+
+"Sally, you must remember--" Mr. Bentley began.
+
+Her tone became modified. Mr. Bentley was apparently the only human of
+whom she stood in awe.
+
+"All I meant was," she said, addressing the rector, "that you've got to
+run across 'em in some natural way."
+
+"I understood perfectly, and I agree with you," Holder replied. "I have
+come, quite recently, to the same conclusion myself."
+
+She gave him a penetrating glance, and he had to admit, inwardly, that a
+certain satisfaction followed Miss Grower's approval.
+
+"Mercy, I have to be going," she exclaimed, glancing at the black marble
+clock on the mantel. "We've got a lot of invoices to put through
+to-day. See you again, Mr. Holder." She jerked his hand once more. "Good
+morning, Mr. Bentley."
+
+"Good morning, Sally."
+
+Mr. Bentley rose, and took his hat and gold-headed stick from the rack
+in the hall.
+
+"You mustn't mind Sally," he said, when they had reached the sidewalk.
+"Sometimes her brusque manner is not understood. But she is a very
+extraordinary woman."
+
+"I can see that," the rector assented quickly, and with a heartiness
+that dispelled all doubt of his liking for Miss Grower. Once more many
+questions rose to his lips, which he suppressed, since Mr. Bentley
+volunteered no information. Hodder became, in fact, so lost in
+speculation concerning Mr. Bentley's establishment as to forget the
+errand on which--they were bound. And Sally Grower's words, apropos
+of the woman in the flat, seemed but an energetic driving home of the
+severe lessons of his recent experiences. And how blind he had been, he
+reflected, not to have seen the thing for himself! Not to have realized
+the essential artificiality of his former method of approach! And then
+it struck him that Sally Grower herself must have had a history.
+
+Mr. Bentley, too, was preoccupied.
+
+Presently, in the midst of these thoughts, Hodder's eyes were arrested
+by a crowd barring the sidewalk on the block ahead; no unusual sight
+in that neighbourhood, and yet one which aroused in him sensations of
+weakness and nausea. Thus were the hidden vice and suffering of these
+sinister places occasionally brought to light, exposed to the curious
+and morbid stares of those whose own turn might come on the morrow. It
+was only by degrees he comprehended that the people were gathered in
+front of the house to which they were bound. An ambulance was seen to
+drive away: it turned into the aide street in front of them.
+
+"A city ambulance!" the rector exclaimed.
+
+Mr. Bentley did not reply.
+
+The murmuring group which overflowed the uneven brick pavement to the
+asphalt was characteristic: women in calico, drudges, women in wrappers,
+with sleepy, awestricken faces; idlers, men and boys who had run out of
+the saloons, whose comments were more audible and caustic, and a fringe
+of children ceaselessly moving on the outskirts. The crowd parted at
+their approach, and they reached the gate, where a burly policeman, his
+helmet in his hand, was standing in the morning sunlight mopping his
+face with a red handkerchief. He greeted Mr. Bentley respectfully, by
+name, and made way for them to pass in.
+
+"What is the trouble, Ryan?" Mr. Bentley asked.
+
+"Suicide, sir," the policeman replied. "Jumped off the bridge this
+morning. A tug picked him up, but he never came to--the strength wasn't
+in him. Sure it's all wore out he was. There was a letter on him, with
+the home number, so they knew where to fetch him. It's a sad case, sir,
+with the woman in there, and the child gone to the hospital not an hour
+ago."
+
+"You mean Garvin?" Mr. Bentley demanded.
+
+"It's him I mean, sir."
+
+"We'd like to go in," said Mr. Bentley. "We came to see them."
+
+"You're welcome, air, and the minister too. It's only them I'm holdin'
+back," and the policeman shook his stick at the people.
+
+Mr. Bentley walked up the steps, and took off his hat as he went through
+the battered doorway. Hodder followed, with a sense of curious faces
+staring at them from the thresholds as they passed; they reached the
+upper passage, and the room, and paused: the shutters were closed,
+the little couch where the child had been was empty. On the bed lay a
+form--covered with a sheet, and beside it a woman kneeling, shaken by
+sobs, ceaselessly calling a name....
+
+A stout figure, hitherto unperceived, rose from a corner and came
+silently toward them--Mrs. Breitmann. She beckoned to them, and they
+followed her into a room on the same floor, where she told them what she
+knew, heedless of the tears coursing ceaselessly down her cheeks.
+
+It seemed that Mrs. Garvin had had a premonition which she had not
+wholly confided to the rector. She had believed her husband never would
+come back; and early in the morning, in spite of all that Mrs. Breitmann
+could do, had insisted at intervals upon running downstairs and scanning
+the street. At half past seven Dr. Jarvis had come and himself carried
+down the child and put him in the back of his automobile. The doctor had
+had a nurse with him, and had begged the mother to accompany them to
+the hospital, saying that he would send her back. But she would not be
+persuaded to leave the house. The doctor could not wait, and had finally
+gone off with little. Dicky, leaving a powder with Mrs. Breitmann for
+the mother. Then she had become uncontrollable.
+
+"Ach, it was terrible!" said the kind woman. "She was crazy, yes--she
+was not in her mind. I make a little coffee, but she will not touch it.
+All those things about her home she would talk of, and how good he was,
+and how she loved him more again than the child.
+
+"Und then the wheels in the street, and she makes a cry and runs to
+see--I cannot hold her...."
+
+"It would be well not to disturb her for a while," said Mr. Bentley,
+seating himself on one of the dilapidated chairs which formed apart of
+the German woman's meagre furniture. "I will remain here if you, Mr.
+Hodder, will make the necessary arrangements for the funeral. Have you
+any objections, sir?"
+
+"Not at all," replied the rector, and left the house, the occupants of
+which had already returned to the daily round of their lives: the rattle
+of dishes and the noise of voices were heard in the 'ci devant' parlour,
+and on the steps he met the little waif with the pitcher of beer; in
+the street the boys who had gathered around the ambulance were playing
+baseball. Hodder glanced up, involuntarily, at the window of the woman
+he had visited the night before, but it was empty. He hurried along the
+littered sidewalks to the drug store, where he telephoned an undertaker;
+and then, as an afterthought, telephoned the hospital. The boy had
+arrived, and was seemingly no worse for the journey.
+
+All this Hodder performed mechanically. Not until he was returning--not,
+indeed, until he entered the house did the whiff of its degrading,
+heated odours bring home to him the tragedy which it held, and he
+grasped the banister on the stairs. The thought that shook him now
+was of the cumulative misery of the city, of the world, of which this
+history on which he had stumbled was but one insignificant incident. But
+he went on into Mrs. Breitmann's room, and saw Mr. Bentley still seated
+where he had left him. The old gentleman looked up at him.
+
+"Mrs. Breitmann and I are agreed, Mr. Hodder, that Mrs. Garvin ought not
+to remain in there. What do you think?"
+
+"By all means, no," said the rector.
+
+The German woman burst into a soliloquy of sympathy that became
+incoherent.
+
+"She will not leave him,--nein--she will not come...."
+
+They went, the three of them, to the doorway of the death chamber and
+stood gazing at the huddled figure of the woman by the bedside. She had
+ceased to cry out: she was as one grown numb under torture; occasionally
+a convulsive shudder shook her. But when Mrs. Breitmann touched her,
+spoke to her, her grief awoke again in all its violence, and it was more
+by force than persuasion that she was finally removed. Mrs. Breitmann
+held one arm, Mr. Bentley another, and between them they fairly carried
+her out, for she was frail indeed.
+
+As for Hodder, something held him back--some dread that he could not at
+once define. And while he groped for it, he stood staring at the man on
+the bed, for the hand of love had drawn back the sheet from the face.
+The battle was over of this poor weakling against the world; the
+torments of haunting fear and hate, of drink and despair had triumphed.
+The sight of the little group of toys brought up the image of the home
+in Alder Street as the wife had pictured it. Was it possible that this
+man, who had gone alone to the bridge in the night, had once been happy,
+content with life, grateful for it, possessed of a simple trust in his
+fellow-men--in Eldon Parr? Once more, unsummoned, came the memory of
+that evening of rain and thunder in the boy's room at the top of the
+great horse in Park Street. He had pitied Eldon Parr then. Did he now?
+
+He crossed the room, on tiptoe, as though he feared to wake once more
+this poor wretch to his misery and hate, Gently he covered again the
+face with the sheet.
+
+Suddenly he knew the reason of his dread,--he had to face the woman!
+He was a minister of Christ, it was his duty to speak to her, as he had
+spoken to others in the hour of sorrow and death, of the justice and
+goodness of the God to whom she had prayed in the church. What should he
+say, now? In an agony of spirit, he sat down on the little couch beside
+the window and buried his face in his hands. The sight of poor Garvin's
+white and wasted features, the terrible contrast between this miserable
+tenement and the palace with its unseen pictures and porcelains and
+tapestries, brought home to him with indescribable poignancy his own
+predicament. He was going to ask this woman to be comforted by faith
+and trust in the God of the man who had driven her husband to death! He
+beheld Eldon Parr in his pew complacently worshipping that God, who had
+rewarded him with riches and success--beheld himself as another man in
+his white surplice acquiescing in that God, preaching vainly....
+
+At last he got to his feet, went out of the room, reached the doorway
+of that other room and looked in. Mr. Bentley sat there; and the woman,
+whose tears had ceased to flow, was looking up into his face.
+
+
+
+II
+
+"The office ensuing," says the Book of Common Prayer, meaning the Burial
+of the Dead, "is not to be used for any Unbaptized adult, any who die
+excommunicate, or who have laid violent hands on themselves."
+
+Hodder had bought, with a part of Nan Ferguson's money, a tiny plot in
+a remote corner of Winterbourne Cemetery. And thither, the next morning,
+the body of Richard Garvin was taken.
+
+A few mourners had stolen into the house and up the threadbare stairs
+into the miserable little back room, somehow dignified as it had never
+been before, and laid their gifts upon the coffin. An odd and pitiful
+assortment they were--mourners and gifts: men and women whose only bond
+with the man in life had been the bond of misery; who had seen him as he
+had fared forth morning after morning in the hopeless search for work,
+and slunk home night after night bitter and dejected; many of whom had
+listened, jeeringly perhaps, to his grievance against the world, though
+it were in some sort their own. Death, for them, had ennobled him. The
+little girl whom Hodder had met with the pitcher of beer came tiptoeing
+with a wilted bunch of pansies, picked heaven knows where; stolen,
+maybe, from one of the gardens of the West End. Carnations, lilies of
+the valley, geraniums even--such were the offerings scattered loosely
+on the lid until a woman came with a mass of white roses that filled
+the room with their fragrance,--a woman with burnished red hair.
+Hodder started as he recognized her; her gaze was a strange mixture of
+effrontery and--something else; sorrow did not quite express it. The
+very lavishness of her gift brought to him irresistibly the reminder of
+another offering. .... She was speaking.
+
+"I don't blame him for what he done--I'd have done it, too, if I'd been
+him. But say, I felt kind of bad when I heard it, knowing about the kid,
+and all. I had to bring something--"
+
+Instinctively Hodder surmised that she was in doubt as to the acceptance
+of her flowers. He took them from her hand, and laid them at the foot of
+the coffin.
+
+"Thank you," he said, simply.
+
+She stared at him a moment with the perplexity she had shown at times on
+the night he visited her, and went out...
+
+Funerals, if they might be dignified by this name, were not infrequent
+occurrences in Dalton Street, and why this one should have been looked
+upon as of sufficient importance to collect a group of onlookers at
+the gate it is difficult to say. Perhaps it was because of the seeming
+interest in it of the higher powers--for suicide and consequent widows
+and orphans were not unknown there. This widow and this orphan were to
+be miraculously rescued, were to know Dalton Street no more. The rector
+of a fashionable church, of all beings, was the agent in the miracle.
+Thus the occasion was tinged with awe. As for Mr. Bentley, his was a
+familiar figure, and had been remarked in Dalton Street funerals before.
+
+They started, the three mourners, on the long drive to the cemetery,
+through unfrequented streets lined with mediocre dwellings, interspersed
+with groceries and saloons--short cuts known only to hearse drivers:
+they traversed, for some distance, that very Wilderness road where Mr.
+Bentley's old-fashioned mansion once had stood on its long green slope,
+framed by ancient trees; the Wilderness road, now paved with hot blocks
+of granite over which the carriage rattled; spread with car tracks,
+bordered by heterogeneous buildings of all characters and descriptions,
+bakeries and breweries, slaughter houses and markets, tumble-down
+shanties, weedy corner lots and "refreshment-houses" that announced
+"Lager Beer, Wines and Liquors." At last they came to a region which was
+neither country nor city, where the road-houses were still in evidence,
+where the glass roofs of greenhouses caught the burning rays of the
+sun, where yards filled with marble blocks and half-finished tombstones
+appeared, and then they turned into the gates of Winterbourne.
+
+Like the city itself, there was a fashionable district in Winterbourne:
+unlike the city, this district remained stationary. There was no soot
+here, and if there had been, the dead would not have minded it. They
+passed the Prestons and the Parrs; the lots grew smaller, the tombstones
+less pretentious; and finally they came to an open grave on a slope
+where the trees were still young, and where three men of the cemetery
+force lifted the coffin from the hearse--Richard Garvin's pallbearers.
+
+John Hodder might not read the service, but there was none to tell him
+that the Gospel of John was not written for this man. He stood an the
+grass beside the grave, and a breeze from across the great river near by
+stirred the maple leaves above his head. "I am the resurrection and the
+life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet
+shall he live." Nor was there any canon to forbid the words of Paul:
+"It is sown in corruption; it is raised in in corruption; it is sown in
+dishonour; it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness; it is raised
+in power; it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body."
+
+They laid the flowers on the fresh earth, even the white roses, and then
+they drove back to the city.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV. A SATURDAY AFTERNOON
+
+
+I
+
+The sight of a certain old gentleman as he walked along the shady
+side of Twenty-second Street about two o'clock on a broiling Saturday
+afternoon in midsummer was one not easily to be forgotten. A younger
+man, tall and vigorous, clad in a thin suit of blue serge, walked by his
+side. They were followed by a shouting troop of small boys who overran
+the pavements, and some of whom were armed with baseball bats. The big
+trolley car was hailed by a dozen dirty little hands.
+
+Even the grumpy passengers were disarmed. The conductor took Mr.
+Bentley's bill deprecatingly, as much as to say that the newly organized
+Traction Company--just out of the receivers' hands--were the Moloch, not
+he, and rang off the fares under protest. And Mr. Bentley, as had been
+his custom for years, sat down and took off his hat, and smiled so
+benignly at those around him that they immediately began to talk, to
+him. It was always irresistible, this desire to talk to Mr. Bentley. If
+you had left your office irritated and out of sorts, your nerves worn to
+an edge by the uninterrupted heat, you invariably got off at your corner
+feeling better. It was Phil Goodrich who had said that Horace Bentley
+had only to get on a Tower Street car to turn it into a church. And if
+he had chosen to establish that 'dernier cri' of modern civilization
+where ladies go who have 'welt-schmerz' without knowing why,--a
+sanitarium, he might have gained back again all the money he had lost in
+giving his Grantham stock to Eldon Parr.
+
+Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, he could have emptied Dalton Street of
+its children. In the first place, there was the irresistible inducement
+to any boy to ride several miles on a trolley without having this right
+challenged by the irate guardian of the vehicle, without being summarily
+requested to alight at twenty-five miles an hour: in the second place,
+there was the soda water and sweet biscuit partaken of after the
+baseball game in that pavilion, more imposing in one's eyes than the Taj
+Mahal. Mr. Bentley would willingly have taken all Dalton Street. He had
+his own 'welt-schmerz', though he did not go to a sanitarium to cure
+it; he was forced to set an age limit of ten, and then establish a high
+court of appeal; for there were boys whose biographies, if they are ever
+written, will be as hazy as those of certain world-wide celebrities who
+might be mentioned concerning the date and exact spot of the entrance
+of their heroes into the light. The solemn protestations, the tears, the
+recrimination even, brought pangs to the old gentleman's heart, for with
+all the will in the world he had been forced in the nature of things, to
+set a limit.
+
+This limit had recently been increased by the unlooked-for appearance on
+these excursions of the tall man in the blue serge suit, whose knowledge
+of the national game and of other matters of vital import to youth
+was gratifying if sometimes disconcerting; who towered, an unruffled
+Gulliver, over their Lilliputian controversies, in which bats were waved
+and fists brought into play and language used on the meaning of which
+the Century dictionary is silent. On one former occasion, indeed, Mr.
+Bentley had found moral suasion, affection, and veneration of no avail,
+and had had to invoke the friendly aid of a park policeman to quell one
+of these incipient riots. To Mr. Bentley baseball was as a sealed book.
+The tall man's justice, not always worthy of the traditions of Solomon,
+had in it an element of force. To be lifted off the ground by strong
+arms at the moment you are about to dust the home plate with your
+adversary is humiliating, but effective. It gradually became apparent
+that a decision was a decision. And one Saturday this inexplicable
+person carried in his hand a mysterious package which, when opened,
+revealed two pairs of diminutive boxing gloves. They instantly became
+popular.
+
+By the time they had made the accidental and somewhat astounding
+discovery that he was a parson, they were willing to overlook it; in
+view, perhaps, of his compensating accomplishments. Instead of advising
+them to turn the other cheek, he taught them uppercuts, feints, and
+jabs, and on the proof of this unexpected acquaintance with a profession
+all of them openly admired, the last vestige of reserve disappeared. He
+was accepted without qualifications.
+
+
+
+II
+
+Although the field to which they resorted was not in the most frequented
+section of the park, pedestrians often passed that way, and sometimes
+lingered. Thus, towards the close of a certain Saturday in July, a young
+woman walked out of the wood path and stood awhile gazing intently
+at the active figure striding among the diminutive, darting forms.
+Presently, with an amused expression, she turned her head to discover
+Mr. Bentley, who sat on a green bench under a tree, his hat and stick on
+the grass beside him. She was unaware that he had been looking at her.
+
+"Aren't they having a good time!" she said, and the genuine thrill in
+her voice betrayed a rare and unmistakable pleasure.
+
+"Ah," replied Mr. Bentley, smiling back at her, "you like to see them,
+too. Most persons do. Children are not meant for the city, my dear young
+lady, their natural home is in the woods and fields, and these little
+fellows are a proof of it. When they come out here, they run wild. You
+perceive," he added with a twinkle, as an expletive of unquestionable
+vigour was hurled across the diamond, "they are not always so polite as
+they might be."
+
+The young woman smiled again, but the look she gave him was a puzzled
+one. And then, quite naturally, she sank, down on the grass, on the
+other side of Mr. Bentley's hat, watching the game for a while in
+silence.
+
+"What a tyrant!" she exclaimed. Another uproar had been quelled, and two
+vigorously protesting runners sent back to their former bases.
+
+"Oh, a benevolent tyrant," Mr. Bentley corrected her. "Mr. Hodder has
+the gift of managing boys,--he understands them. And they require a
+strong hand. His generation has had the training which mine lacked. In
+my day, at college, we worked off our surplus energy on the unfortunate
+professors, and we carried away chapel bells and fought with the
+townspeople."
+
+It required some effort, she found, to imagine this benevolent looking
+old gentleman assaulting professors.
+
+"Nowadays they play baseball and football, and box!" He pointed to the
+boxing gloves on the grass. "Mr. Hodder has taught them to settle their
+differences in that way; it is much more sensible."
+
+She picked off the white clover-tops.
+
+"So that is Mr. Hodder, of St. John's," she said.
+
+"Ah, you know him, then?"
+
+"I've met him," she answered quietly. "Are these children connected with
+his church?"
+
+"They are little waifs from Dalton Street and that vicinity," said Mr.
+Bentley. "Very few of them, I should imagine, have ever been inside of a
+church."
+
+She seemed surprised.
+
+"But--is it his habit to bring them out here?" The old gentleman beamed
+on her, perhaps with the hint of a smile at her curiosity.
+
+"He has found time for it, this summer. It is very good of him."
+
+She refrained from comment on this remark, falling into reflection,
+leaning back, with one hand outstretched, on the grass. The game went on
+vociferously, the shrill lithe voices piercing the silence of the summer
+afternoon. Mr. Bentley's eyes continued to rest on her.
+
+"Tell me," he inquired, after a while, "are you not Alison Parr?"
+
+She glanced up at him, startled. "Yes."
+
+"I thought so, although I have not seen you since you were a little
+girl. I knew your mother very well indeed, but it is too much to expect
+you to remember me, after all this time. No doubt you have forgotten my
+name. I am Mr. Bentley."
+
+"Mr. Bentley!" she cried, sitting upright and gazing at him. "How stupid
+of me not to have known you! You couldn't have been any one else."
+
+It was the old gentleman's turn to start. She rose impulsively and sat
+down on the bench beside him, and his hand trembled as he laid it in
+hers.
+
+"Yes, my dear, I am still alive. But surely you cannot remember me,
+Alison?"
+
+The old look of almost stubborn honesty he recalled in the child came
+into her eyes.
+
+"I do--and I don't," she said, perplexed. "It seemed to me as if I ought
+to have recognized you when I came up, and yet I hadn't the slightest
+notion who you were. I knew you were somebody."
+
+He shook his head, but did not speak.
+
+"But you have always been a fact in my existence--that is what I want
+to say," she went on. "It must be possible to remember a person and not
+recognize him, that is what I feel. I can remember you coming to our
+house in Ransome Street, and how I looked forward to your visits. And
+you used to have little candy beans in your pockets," she cried. "Have
+you now?"
+
+His eyes were a little dimmed as he reached, smilingly, into the
+skirts of a somewhat shiny but scrupulously brushed coat and produced a
+brightly colored handful. She took one, and put it in her mouth:
+
+"Oh," she said, "how good they were--Isn't it strange how a taste brings
+back events? I can remember it all as if it were yesterday, and how I
+used to sit on your knee, and mother would tell me not to bother you."
+
+"And now--you are grown," he said.
+
+"Something more than grown," she smiled. "I was thirty-one in May. Tell
+me," she asked, choosing another of the beans which he still absently
+held, "do you get them for these?" And she nodded toward the Dalton
+Street waifs.
+
+"Yes," he said, "they are children, too."
+
+"I can remember," she said, after a pause, "I can remember my mother
+speaking of you to me the year she died. I was almost grown, then. It
+was after we had moved up to Park Street, and her health had already
+begun to fail. That made an impression on me, but I have forgotten
+what she said--it was apropos of some recollection. No--it was a
+photograph--she was going over some old things." Alison ceased speaking
+abruptly, for the pain in Mr. Bentley's remarkable grey eyes had
+not escaped her. What was it about him? Why could she not recall?
+Long-forgotten, shadowy episodes of the past tormented her, flitted
+provokingly through her mind--ungrasped: words dropped in her presence
+which had made their impression, but the gist of which was gone. Why
+had Mr. Bentley ceased coming to the house? So strongly did she feel his
+presence now that the thought occurred to her,--perhaps her mother had
+not wished her to forget him!
+
+"I did not suspect," she heard him saying, "that you would go out into
+the world and create the beautiful gardens of which I have heard. But
+you had no lack of spirit in those days, too."
+
+"I was a most disagreeable child, perverse,--cantankerous--I can hear
+my mother saying it! As for the gardens--they have given me something to
+do, they have kept me out of mischief. I suppose I ought to be thankful,
+but I still have the rebellious streak when I see what others have done,
+what others are doing, and I sometimes wonder what right I ever had to
+think that I might create something worth while."
+
+He glanced at her quickly as she sat with bent head.
+
+"Others put a higher value on what you have done."
+
+"Oh, they don't know--" she exclaimed.
+
+If something were revealed to him by her tone, he did not betray it, but
+went on cheerfully.
+
+"You have been away a long time, Alison. It must interest you to come
+back, and see the changes in our Western civilization. We are moving
+very rapidly--in certain directions," he corrected himself.
+
+She appraised his qualification.
+
+"In certain directions,--yes. But they are little better in the East. I
+have scarcely been back," she added, "since I went to Paris to study.
+I have often thought I should like to return and stay awhile, only--I
+never seemed to get time. Now I am going over a garden for my father
+which was one of my first efforts, and which has always reproached me."
+
+"And you do not mind the heat?" he asked. "Those who go East to live
+return to find our summers oppressive."
+
+"Oh, I'm a salamander, I think," Alison laughed.
+
+Thus they sat chatting, interrupted once or twice by urchins too small
+to join in the game, who came running to Mr. Bentley and stood staring
+at Alison as at a being beyond the borders of experience: and she
+would smile at them quite as shyly,--children being beyond her own. Her
+imagination was as keen, as unspoiled as a child's, and was stimulated
+by a sense of adventure, of the mystery which hung about this fine old
+gentleman who betrayed such sentiment for a mother whom she had loved
+and admired and still secretly mourned. Here, if there had been no
+other, was a compelling bond of sympathy....
+
+The shadows grew longer, the game broke up. And Hodder, surrounded by
+an argumentative group keeping pace with him, came toward them from the
+field; Alison watched him curiously as he turned this way and that to
+answer the insistent questions with which he was pelted, and once she
+saw him stride rapidly after a dodging delinquent and seize him by the
+collar amidst piercing yells of approval, and derision for the rebel.
+
+"It's remarkable how he gets along with them," said Mr. Bentley, smiling
+at the scene. "Most of them have never known what discipline is."
+
+The chorus approached. And Hodder, recognizing her, dropped the collar
+he held: A young woman conversing with Mr. Bentley--was no unusual
+sight,--he had made no speculations as to this one's identity. He left
+the boys, and drew near.
+
+"You know Miss Parr, I believe," the old gentleman said.
+
+Hodder took her hand. He had often tried to imagine his feelings if he
+should meet her again: what he should do and say,--what would be their
+footing. And now he had no time to prepare....
+
+"It is so strange," she said, with that note of wonder at life in her
+voice which he recalled so well, "that I should have come across Mr.
+Bentley here after so many years. How many years, Mr. Bentley?"
+
+"Ah, my dear," he protested, "my measurements would not be yours."
+
+"It is better for both of us not to say, Alison declared, laughingly.
+
+"You knew Mr. Bentley?" asked Hodder, astonished.
+
+"He was a very dear friend of my mother's, although I used to
+appropriate him when he came to our house. It was when we lived in
+Ransome Street, ages ago. But I don't think Mr. Bentley has grown a bit
+older."
+
+"He is one of the few who have found the secret of youth," said the
+rector.
+
+But the old gentleman had moved off into the path, or perhaps it would
+be more accurate to say that he was carried off by the swarm which
+clustered around him, two smaller ones tugging at his hand, and all
+intent upon arriving at the soda-water pavilion near the entrance. They
+had followed him with their eyes, and they saw him turn around and smile
+at them, helplessly. Alison presented a perplexed face to Hodder.
+
+"Does he bring them here,--or you?" she asked.
+
+"I--" he hesitated. "Mr. Bentley has done this every Saturday afternoon
+for years," he said, "I am merely one of them."
+
+She looked at him quickly. They had started to follow, in the cool path
+beneath the forest trees. Restraint fell upon them, brought about by the
+memory of the intimacy of their former meeting, further complicated on
+Hodder's part by his new attitude toward her father, and his finding
+her in the company, of all persons, of Mr. Bentley. Unuttered queries
+pressed on the minds of both.
+
+"Tell me about Mr. Bentley," she said.
+
+Hodder hesitated.
+
+"I scarcely know where to begin," he replied, yet smiling at the
+characteristic abruptness of her question. The modulations of her voice
+revealed again the searching, inquisitive spirit within her, and his
+responded to the intensity of the interest in Mr. Bentley.
+
+"Begin anywhere."
+
+"Anywhere?" he repeated, seeking to gain time.
+
+"Yes--anywhere," she said impatiently.
+
+"Well, he lives in Dalton Street, if you recall what kind of a place
+that is" (she nodded), "and he is known from one end of it to the
+other."
+
+"I see what he is--he is the most extraordinary person I have ever
+known. Just to talk to him gives one such a queer feeling of--of
+dissatisfaction with one's self, and seeing him once more seems to have
+half revived in me a whole series of dead memories. And I have been
+trying to think, but it is all so tantalizing. There is some mystery
+about him," she insisted. "He disappeared suddenly, and my mother never
+mentioned him but once afterward, but other persons have spoken of him
+since--I forget who. He was so well known, and he used to go to St.
+John's."
+
+"Yes, he used to go to St. John's."
+
+"What happened to him--do you know? The reason he stopped coming to our
+house was some misunderstanding with my father, of course. I am positive
+my mother never changed her feelings toward him."
+
+"I can only tell you what he has told me, which is all I
+know--authoritatively," Hodder replied. How could he say to her that her
+father had ruined Mr. Bentley? Indeed, with a woman of her fearlessness
+and honesty--and above all, her intuition,--he felt the cruelty of his
+position keenly. Hodder did not relish half truths; and he felt that,
+however scant his intercourse in the future might be with Alison Parr,
+he would have liked to have kept it on that basis of frankness in which
+it had begun. But the exact stage of disillusionment she had reached in
+regard to Eldon Parr was unknown to him, and he feared that a further
+revelation might possibly sever the already precarious tie between
+father and daughter.
+
+He recounted, therefore, that Mr. Bentley had failed; and how he had
+before that given much of his estate away in charity, how he had been
+unable to keep his pew in St. John's, and had retired to the house in
+Dalton Street.
+
+For some moments after he had finished Alison did not reply.
+
+"What is his number in Dalton Street?" she asked.
+
+Hodder informed her.
+
+He could not read in her face whether she suspected that he could have
+told her more. And in spite of an inordinate, human joy in being again
+in her presence, his desire to hide from her that which had taken
+place within him, and the inability he felt to read his future, were
+instinctive: the more so because of the very spontaneity they had
+achieved at their first meeting. As a man, he shrank from confessing
+to her, however indirectly, the fact that she herself was so vital an
+element in his disillusionment. For the conversation in the garden had
+been the immediate cause of the inner ferment ending in his resolution
+to go away, and had directed him, by logical steps, to the encounter in
+the church with Mrs. Garvin.
+
+"You have not yet finished the garden?" he asked. "I imagined you back
+in the East by this time."
+
+"Oh, I am procrastinating," she replied. "It is a fit of sheer laziness.
+I ought to be elsewhere, but I was born without a conscience. If I had
+one I should try to quiet it by reminding it that I am fulfilling a
+long-delayed promise--I am making a garden for Mrs. Larrabbee. You know
+her, of course, since she is a member of your congregation."
+
+"Yes, I know her," he assented. And his mind was suddenly filled with
+vivid colour,--cobalt seas, and arsenic-green spruces with purple cones,
+cardinal-striped awnings that rattled in the salt breeze, and he saw
+once more the panorama of the life which had passed from him and the
+woman in the midst of it. And his overwhelming thought was of relief
+that he had somehow escaped. In spite of his unhappiness now, he would
+not have gone back. He realized for the first time that he had been
+nearer annihilation then than to-day.
+
+"Grace isn't here to bother me with the ideas she has picked up in
+Europe and catalogued," Alison continued.
+
+"Catalogued!" Hodder exclaimed, struck by the pertinency of the word.
+
+"Yes. Did you ever know anybody who had succeeded half so well
+in piecing together and absorbing into a harmonized whole all the
+divergent, artificial elements that enter into the conventional world
+to-day? Her character might be called a triumph of synthesis. For she
+has actually achieved an individuality--that is what always surprises
+me when I think of her. She has put the puzzle picture together, she has
+become a person."
+
+He remembered, with a start, that this was the exact word Mrs. Larrabbee
+had used about Alison Parr. If he had searched the world, he could not
+have found a greater contrast than that between these two women. And
+when she spoke again, he was to be further struck by her power of
+logical insight.
+
+"Grace wants me because she thinks I have become the fashion--for
+the same reason that Charlotte Plimpton wants me. Only there is this
+difference--Grace will know the exact value of what I shall have done.
+Not that she thinks me a Le Notre"--Alison laughed--"What I mean is, she
+sees behind, she sees why it is fashionable to have a garden, since she
+has worked out the values of that existence. But there!" Alison added,
+with a provocative touch that did not escape him, "I am picking your
+parishioners to pieces again."
+
+"You have more right than I," he replied, "they have been your friends
+since childhood."
+
+"I thought you had gone away," she said.
+
+"Why?" he demanded. Had she been to church again?
+
+"My father told me before he left that you were to take a cruise with
+him on the yacht he has chartered."
+
+"He wrote me from New York--I was unable to go," Hodder said slowly.
+
+He felt her gaze upon him, but resolutely refused to meet it.... They
+walked on in silence until they came to the more open spaces near the
+edge of the Park, thronged that Saturday evening by crowds which had
+sought the city's breathing space. Perfect trees cast long, fantastic
+shadows across the lawns, fountains flung up rainbows from the midst of
+lakes; children of the tenements darted hither and thither, rolled and
+romped on the grass; family parties picnicked everywhere, and a very
+babel of tongues greeted the ear--the languages of Europe from Sweden to
+Italy.
+
+Suddenly an exclamation from her aroused and thrilled him.
+
+"Isn't it wonderful how happy they are, and with what simple pleasures
+they are satisfied! I often come over here on Saturdays and Sundays,
+just to talk to them."
+
+"Talk to them!" he echoed stupidly. "In their own languages?"
+
+"Oh, I know a little German and Italian, though I can't lay claim to
+Czech," she answered gayly. "Why are you so surprised that I should
+possess such modest accomplishments?"
+
+"It's not the accomplishments." He hesitated.
+
+"No. You are surprised that I should be interested in humanity."
+She stood facing him. "Well, I am," she said, half humorously, half
+defiantly. "I believe I am more interested in human beings than in
+anything else in the world--when they are natural, as these people are
+and when they will tell one their joys and their troubles and their
+opinions."
+
+"Enthusiasm, self-assertion, had as usual, transformed her, and he saw
+the colour glowing under her olive skin. Was she accusing him of a lack
+of frankness?
+
+"And why," he asked, collecting himself, "did you think--" he got no
+further.
+
+"It's because you have an idea that I'm a selfish Epicurean, if that
+isn't tautology--because I'm interested in a form of art, the rest of
+the world can go hang. You have a prejudice against artists. I wish I
+really were one, but I'm not."
+
+This speech contained so many surprises for him that he scarcely knew
+how to answer it.
+
+"Give me a little time," he begged, "and perhaps I'll get over my
+prejudices. The worst of them, at any rate. You are helping me to do
+so." He tried to speak lightly, but his tone was more serious in the
+next sentence. "It seems to me personally that you have proved your
+concern for your fellow-creatures."
+
+Her colour grew deeper, her manner changed.
+
+"That gives me the opportunity to say something I have hoped to say,
+ever since I saw you. I hoped I should see you again."
+
+"You are not going away soon?" he exclaimed.
+
+The words were spoken before he grasped their significance.
+
+"Not at once. I don't know how long I shall stay," she answered
+hurriedly, intent upon what was in her mind. "I have thought a great
+deal about what I said to you that afternoon, and I find it more than
+ever difficult to excuse myself. I shan't attempt to. I merely mean to
+ask you to forgive me."
+
+"There is nothing to forgive," he assured her, under the influence of
+the feeling she had aroused.
+
+"It's nice of you to say so, and to take it as you did--nicer than I can
+express. I am afraid I shall never learn to appreciate that there may be
+other points of view toward life than my own. And I should have realized
+and sympathized with the difficulties of your position, and that you
+were doing the best under the circumstances."
+
+"No," he exclaimed, "don't say that! Your other instinct was the truer
+one, if indeed you have really changed it--I don't believe you have." He
+smiled at her again. "You didn't hurt my feelings, you did me a service.
+I told you so at the time, and I meant it. And, more than that, I
+understood."
+
+"You understood--?"
+
+"You were not criticizing me, you were--what shall I say?--merely trying
+to iron out some of the inconsistencies of life. Well, you helped me
+to iron out some of the inconsistencies of my own. I am profoundly
+grateful."
+
+She gazed at him, puzzled. But he did not, he could not enlighten her.
+Some day she would discover what he meant.
+
+"If so, I am glad," she said, in a low voice.
+
+They were standing in the midst of the crowd that thronged around the
+pavilion. An urchin caught hold of the rector's coat.
+
+"Here he is! Say, Mr. Hodder, ain't you going to have any sody?"
+
+"Certainly we are," he replied, returning Alison's faint smile.... In
+the confusion that followed he caught a glimpse of her talking to Mr.
+Bentley; and later, after he had taken her hand, his eyes followed her
+figure wending its way in the evening light through the groups toward
+Park Street, and he saw above the tree-tops the red tiled roof of the
+great house in which she was living, alone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV. THE CRUCIBLE
+
+
+I
+
+For better or worse John Hodder had flung his treasured beliefs into the
+crucible, and one by one he watched them crumble and consume away. None
+but his own soul knew what it cost him to make the test; and some times,
+in the early stages of it, he would cast down his book under the lamp
+and walk for hours in the night. Curiosity, and the despair of one who
+is lost impelled him to persist.
+
+It had been said of him that he had a talent for the law, and he now
+discovered that his mind, once freed, weighed the evidence with a
+pitiless logic, paid its own tribute--despite the anguish of the
+heart--to the pioneers of truth whose trail it followed into the
+Unknown, who had held no Mystery more sacred than Truth itself, who had
+dared to venture into the nothingness between the whirling worlds.
+
+He considered them, those whirling worlds, at night. Once they had
+been the candles of Jehovah, to light the path of his chosen nation,
+to herald the birth of his Son. And now? How many billions of blind,
+struggling creatures clung to them? Where now was this pin-point
+of humanity, in the midst of an appalling spectacle of a grinding,
+remorseless nature?
+
+And that obscure Event on which he had staked his hopes? Was He, as John
+had written, the First Born of the Universe, the Word Incarnate of a
+system that defied time and space, the Logos of an outworn philosophy?
+Was that Universe conscious, as Berkeley had declared, or the blind
+monster of substance alone, or energy, as some modern scientists
+brutally and triumphantly maintained? Where was the Spirit that breathed
+in it of hope?
+
+Such were some of the questions that thronged for solution. What was
+mind, what spirit? an attenuated vapour of the all-pervading substance?
+
+He could not permit himself to dwell on these thoughts--madness lay
+that way. Madness, and a watching demon that whispered of substance, and
+sought to guide his wanderings in the night. Hodder clung to the shell
+of reality, to the tiny panorama of the visible and the finite, to the
+infinitesimal gropings that lay recorded before him on the printed page.
+Let him examine these first, let him discover--despite the price--what
+warrant the mind of man (the only light now vouchsafed to him in his
+darkness) gave him to speculate and to hope concerning the existence of
+a higher, truer Reality than that which now tossed and wounded him. It
+were better to know.
+
+Scarcely had the body been lifted from the tree than the disputes
+commenced, the adulterations crept in. The spontaneity, the fire and
+zeal of the self-sacrificing itinerant preachers gave place to the
+paralyzing logic then pervading the Roman Empire, and which had sent
+its curse down the ages to the modern sermon; the geometrical rules of
+Euclid were made to solve the secrets of the universe. The simple faith
+of the cross which had inspired the martyr along the bloody way from
+Ephesus to the Circus at Rome was formalized by degrees into philosophy:
+the faith of future ages was settled by compromises, by manipulation,
+by bribery in Councils of the Church which resembled modern political
+conventions, and in which pagan Emperors did not hesitate to exert their
+influence over the metaphysical bishops of the factions. Recriminations,
+executions, murders--so the chronicles ran.
+
+The prophet, the idealist disappeared, the priest with his rites and
+ceremonies and sacrifices, his power to save and damn, was once more in
+possession of the world.
+
+The Son of Man was degraded into an infant in his mother's arms. An
+unhealthy, degenerating asceticism, drawn from pagan sources, began with
+the monks and anchorites of Egypt and culminated in the spectacle of
+Simeon's pillar. The mysteries of Eleusis, of Attis, Mithras, Magna
+Mater and Isis developed into Christian sacraments--the symbol became
+the thing itself. Baptism the confession of the new life, following
+the customs of these cults, became initiation; and from the same
+superstitious origins, the repellent materialistic belief that to eat
+of the flesh and drink of the blood of a god was to gain immortality:
+immortality of the body, of course.
+
+
+Ah, when the superstitions of remote peoples, the fables and myths,
+were taken away; when the manufactured history and determinism of the
+Israelites from the fall of man to the coming of that Messiah, whom the
+Jews crucified because he failed to bring them their material Kingdom,
+were discredited; when the polemic and literal interpretations of
+evangelists had been rejected, and the pious frauds of tampering monks;
+when the ascetic Buddhism was removed; the cults and mysteries, the
+dogmas of an ancient naive philosophy discarded; the crude science of a
+Ptolemy who conceived the earth as a flat terrestrial expanse and hell
+as a smoking pit beneath proved false; the revelation of a Holy City of
+jasper and gold and crystal, the hierarchy with its divine franchise to
+save and rule and conquer,--when all these and more were eliminated from
+Christianity, what was left?
+
+Hodder surveyed the ruins. And his mind recalled, that Sunday of rain
+in New York which had been the turning-point in his life, when he had
+listened to the preacher, when he had walked the streets unmindful
+of the wet, led on by visions, racked by fears. And the same terror
+returned to him now after all the years of respite, tenfold increased,
+of falling in the sight of man from the topmost tower.
+
+What was to become of him, now that the very driving power of life was
+gone? Where would he go? to what might he turn his hand, since all were
+vanity and illusion? Careers meant nothing, had any indeed been possible
+to a man forty, left staring at stark reality after the rainbow had
+vanished. Nineveh had mocked and conquered him who had thought himself
+a conqueror. Self flew back and swung on its central pivot and took
+command. His future, his fate, what was to become of him. Who else now
+was to be considered? And what was to restrain him from reaching out his
+hand to pluck the fruit which he desired?...
+
+
+
+II
+
+What control from the Unknown is this which now depresses and now
+releases the sensitive thing called the soul of man, and sends it upward
+again until the green light of hope shines through the surface water?
+He might have grown accustomed, Holder thought, to the obscurity of
+the deeps; in which, after a while, the sharp agony of existence became
+dulled, the pressure benumbing. He was conscious himself, at such times,
+of no inner recuperation. Something drew him up, and he would find
+himself living again, at length to recognize the hand if not to
+comprehend the power.
+
+The hand was Horace Bentley's.
+
+What was the source of that serenity which shone on the face of his
+friend? Was it the light of faith? Faith in--what? Humanity, Mr. Bentley
+had told him on that first evening when they had met: faith in a world
+filled with cruelties, disillusionments, lies, and cheats! On what
+Authority was it based? Holder never asked, and no word of theology ever
+crossed Mr. Bentley's lips; not by so much as a sign did he betray any
+knowledge he may have had of the drama taking place in Holder's soul; no
+comment escaped him on the amazing anomalies of the life the rector was
+leading, in the Church but not of it.
+
+It was only by degrees Holder came to understand that no question would
+be asked, and the frequency of his visits to Dalton Street increased. He
+directed his steps thither sometimes hurriedly, as though pursued, as to
+a haven from a storm. And a haven it was indeed! At all hours of the
+day he came, and oftener in the night, in those first weeks, and if
+Mr. Bentley were not at home the very sight of the hospitable old darky
+brought surging up within him a sense of security, of, relief; the
+library itself was filled with the peace of its owner. How many
+others had brought their troubles here, had been lightened on the very
+threshold of this sanctuary!
+
+Gradually Hodder began to realize something of their numbers. Gradually,
+as he was drawn more and more into the network of the relationships of
+this extraordinary man,--nay, as he inevitably became a part of that
+network,--a period of bewilderment ensued. He found himself involved,
+and quite naturally, in unpremeditated activities, running errands,
+forming human ties on a human basis. No question was asked, no
+credentials demanded or rejected. Who he was made no difference--he was
+a friend of Horace Bentley's. He had less time to read, less time to
+think, to scan the veil of his future.
+
+He had run through a score of volumes, critical, philosophical,
+scientific, absorbing their contents, eagerly anticipating their
+conclusions; filled, once he had begun, with a mania to destroy, a
+savage determination to leave nothing,--to level all....
+
+And now, save for the less frequent relapsing moods, he had grown
+strangely unconcerned about his future, content to live in the presence
+of this man; to ignore completely the aspects of a life incomprehensible
+to the few, besides Mr. Bentley, who observed it.
+
+What he now mostly felt was relief, if not a faint self-congratulation
+that he had had the courage to go through with it, to know the worst.
+And he was conscious even, at times, of a faint reviving sense of
+freedom he had not known since the days at Bremerton. If the old dogmas
+were false, why should he regret them? He began to see that, once he had
+suspected their falsity, not to have investigated were to invite decay;
+and he pictured himself growing more unctuous, apologetic, plausible.
+He had, at any rate, escaped the more despicable fate, and if he went to
+pieces now it would be as a man, looking the facts in the face,--not as
+a coward and a hypocrite.
+
+Late one afternoon, when he dropped in at Mr. Bentley's house, he was
+informed by Sam that a lady was awaiting Mr. Bentley in the library. As
+Hodder opened the door he saw a tall, slim figure of a woman with her
+back toward him. She was looking at the photographs on the mantel.
+
+It was Alison Parr!
+
+He remembered now that she had asked for Mr. Bentley's number, but it
+had never occurred to him that he might one day find her here. And as
+she turned he surprised in her eyes a shyness he had never seen in them
+before. Thus they stood gazing at each other a moment before either
+spoke.
+
+"Oh, I thought you were Mr. Bentley," she said.
+
+"Have you been waiting long?" he asked.
+
+"Three quarters of an hour, but I haven't minded it. This is such an
+interesting room, with its pictures and relics and books. It has a
+soothing effect, hasn't it? To come here is like stepping out of the
+turmoil of the modern world into a peaceful past."
+
+He was struck by the felicity of her description.
+
+"You have been here before?" he asked.
+
+"Yes." She settled herself in the armchair; and Hodder, accepting the
+situation, took the seat beside her. "Of course I came, after I had
+found out who Mr. Bentley was. The opportunity to know him again--was
+not to be missed."
+
+"I can understand that," he assented.
+
+"That is, if a child can even be said to know such a person as Mr.
+Bentley. Naturally, I didn't appreciate him in those days--children
+merely accept, without analyzing. And I have not yet been able to
+analyze,--I can only speculate and consider."
+
+Her enthusiasm never failed to stir and excite Hodder. Nor would he have
+thought it possible that a new value could be added to Mr. Bentley in
+his eyes. Yet so it was.
+
+He felt within him, as she spoke, the quickening of a stimulus.
+
+"When I came in a little while ago," Alison continued, "I found a woman
+in black, with such a sweet, sad face. We began a conversation. She had
+been through a frightful experience. Her husband had committed suicide,
+her child had been on the point of death, and she says that she lies
+awake nights now thinking in terror of what might have happened to
+her if you and Mr. Bentley hadn't helped her. She's learning to be a
+stenographer. Do you remember her?--her name is Garvin."
+
+"Did she say--anything more?" Hodder anxiously demanded.
+
+"No," said Alison, surprised by his manner, "except that Mr. Bentley
+had found her a place to live, near the hospital, with a widow who was
+a friend of his. And that the child was well, and she could look life
+in the face again. Oh, it is terrible to think that people all around us
+are getting into such straits, and that we are so indifferent to it!"
+
+Hodder did not speak at once. He was wondering, now that she had renewed
+her friendship with Mr. Bentley, whether certain revelations on her part
+were not inevitable....
+
+She was regarding him, and he was aware that her curiosity was aflame.
+Again he wondered whether it were curiosity or--interest.
+
+"You did not tell me, when we met in the Park, that you were no longer
+at St. John's."
+
+"Did Mr. Bentley tell you?"
+
+"No. He merely said he saw a great deal of you. Martha Preston told
+me. She is still here, and goes to church occasionally. She was much
+surprised to learn that you were in the city.
+
+"I am still living in the parish house," he said. "I am--taking my
+vacation."
+
+"With Mr. Bentley?" Her eyes were still on his face.
+
+"With Mr. Bentley," he replied.
+
+He had spoken without bitterness. Although there had indeed been
+bitterness in his soul, it passed away in the atmosphere of Mr.
+Bentley's house. The process now taking place in him was the same
+complication of negative and positive currents he had felt in her
+presence before. He was surprised to find that his old antipathy to
+agnosticism held over, in her case; to discover, now, that he was by
+no means, as yet, in view of the existence of Horace Bentley, to go the
+full length of unbelief! On the other hand, he saw that she had divined
+much of what had happened to him, and he felt radiating from her a
+sympathetic understanding which seemed almost a claim. She had a claim,
+although he could not have said of what it was constituted. Their
+personal relationship bore responsibilities. It suddenly came over him,
+in fact, that the two persons who in all the world were nearest him were
+herself and Mr. Bentley! He responded, scarce knowing why he did so, to
+the positive current.
+
+"With Mr. Bentley," he repeated, smiling, and meeting her eyes, "I have
+been learning something about the actual conditions of life in a modern
+city."
+
+She bent a little toward him in one of those spontaneous movements that
+characterized her.
+
+"Tell me--what is his life?" she asked. "I have seen so little of it,
+and he has told me nothing himself. At first, in the Park, I saw only
+a kindly old gentleman, with a wonderful, restful personality, who had
+been a dear friend of my mother's. I didn't connect those boys with him.
+But since then--since I have been here twice, I have seen other things
+which make me wonder how far his influence extends." She paused.
+
+"I, too, have wondered," said the rector, thoughtfully. "When I met
+him, I supposed he were merely living in simple relationships with his
+neighbours here in Dalton Street, but by degrees I have discovered that
+his relationships are as wide as the city itself. And they have grown
+naturally--by radiation, as it were. One incident has led to another,
+one act of kindness to another, until now there seems literally no end
+to the men and women with whom he is in personal touch, who are ready to
+do anything in their power for him at any time. It is an institution,
+in fact, wholly unorganized, which in the final analysis is one man. And
+there is in it absolutely nothing of that element which has come to be
+known as charity."
+
+Alison listened with parted lips.
+
+"To give you an example," he went on, gradually be coming fired by his
+subject, by her absorption, "since you have mentioned Mrs. Garvin, I
+will tell you what happened in that case. It is typical of many. It was
+a question of taking care of this woman, who was worn out and crushed,
+until she should recover sufficiently to take care of herself. Mr.
+Bentley did not need any assistance from me to get the boy into the
+hospital--Dr. Jarvis worships him. But the mother. I might possibly have
+got her into an institutional home--Mr. Bentley did better than that,
+far better. On the day of the funeral we went directly from the cemetery
+to the house of a widow who owns a little fruit farm beyond the Park.
+Her name is Bledsoe, and it is not an exaggeration to say that her
+house, small as it is, contains an endowed room always at Mr. Bentley's
+disposal.
+
+"Mrs. Garvin is there now. She was received as a friend, as a guest--not
+as an inmate, a recipient of charity. I shall never forget how that
+woman ran out in the sun when she saw us coming, how proud she was to be
+able to do this thing, how she ushered us into the little parlour, that
+was all swept and polished, and how naturally and warmly she welcomed
+the other woman, dazed and exhausted, and took her hat and veil and
+almost carried her up the stairs. And later on I found out from Miss
+Grower, who lives here, Mrs. Bledsoe's history. Eight or nine years ago
+her husband was sent to prison for forgery, and she was left with four
+small children, on the verge of a fate too terrible to mention. She was
+brought to Mr. Bentley's attention, and he started her in life.
+
+"And now Mrs. Garvin forms another link to that chain, which goes on
+growing. In a month she will be earning her own living as stenographer
+for a grain merchant whom Mr. Bentley set on his feet several years ago.
+One thing has led to the next. And--I doubt if any neighbourhood could
+be mentioned, north or south or west, or even in the business portion of
+the city itself, where men and women are not to be found ready and
+eager to do anything in their power for him. Of course there have been
+exceptions, what might be called failures in the ordinary terminology of
+charity, but there are not many."
+
+When he had finished she sat quite still, musing over what he had told
+her, her eyes alight.
+
+"Yes, it is wonderful," she said at length, in a low voice. "Oh, I can
+believe in that, making the world a better place to live in, making
+people happier. Of course every one cannot be like Mr. Bentley, but all
+may do their share in their own way. If only we could get rid of this
+senseless system of government that puts a premium on the acquisition of
+property! As it is, we have to depend on individual initiative. Even the
+good Mr. Bentley does is a drop in the ocean compared to what might
+be done if all this machinery--which has been invented, if all these
+discoveries of science, by which the forces of an indifferent nature
+have been harnessed, could be turned to the service of all mankind.
+Think of how many Mrs. Garvins, of how many Dalton Streets there are in
+the world, how many stunted children working in factories or growing up
+into criminals in the slums! I was reading a book just the other day
+on the effect of the lack of nutrition on character. We are breeding
+a million degenerate citizens by starving them, to say nothing of the
+effect of disease and bad air, of the constant fear of poverty that
+haunts the great majority of homes. There is no reason why that fear
+should not be removed, why the latest discoveries in medicine and
+science should not be at the disposal of all."
+
+The genuineness of her passion was unmistakable. His whole being
+responded to it.
+
+"Have you always felt like this?" he asked.
+
+"Like what?"
+
+"Indignant--that so many people were suffering."
+
+His question threw her into reflection.
+
+"Why, no," she answered, at length, "I never thought----I see what you
+mean. Four or five years ago, when I was going to socialist lectures, my
+sense of all this--inequality, injustice was intellectual. I didn't get
+indignant over it, as I do now when I think of it."
+
+"And why do you get indignant now?"
+
+"You mean," she asked, "that I have no right to be indignant, since I do
+nothing to attempt to better conditions?--"
+
+"Not at all," Hodder disavowed. "Perhaps my question is too personal,
+but I didn't intend it to be. I was merely wondering whether any event
+or series of events had transformed a mere knowledge of these conditions
+into feeling."
+
+"Oh!" she exclaimed, but not in offence. Once more she relapsed into
+thought. And as he watched her, in silence, the colour that flowed and
+ebbed in her cheeks registered the coming and going of memories; of
+incidents in her life hidden from him, arousing in the man the torture
+of jealousy. But his faculties, keenly alert, grasped the entire
+field; marked once more the empirical trait in her that he loved her
+unflinching willingness to submit herself to an experiment.
+
+"I suppose so," she replied at length, her thoughts naturally assuming
+speech. "Yes, I can see that it is so. Yet my experience has not been
+with these conditions with which Mr. Bentley, with which you have been
+brought in contact, but with the other side--with luxury. Oh, I am sick
+of luxury! I love it, I am not at all sure that I could do without it,
+but I hate it, too, I rebel against it. You can't understand that."
+
+"I think I can," he answered her.
+
+"When I see the creatures it makes," she cried, "I hate it. My
+profession has brought me in such close contact with it that I rebelled
+at last, and came out here very suddenly, just to get away from it
+in the mass. To renew my youth, if I could. The gardens were only an
+excuse. I had come to a point where I wanted to be quiet, to be alone,
+to think, and I knew my father would be going away. So much of my
+girlhood was spent in that Park that I know every corner of it, and
+I--obeyed the impulse. I wanted to test it."
+
+"Yes," he said, absorbed.
+
+"I might have gone to the mountains or the sea, but some one would have
+come and found me, and I should have been bound again--on the wheel.
+I shouldn't have had the strength to resist. But here--have you ever
+felt," she demanded, "that you craved a particular locality at a certain
+time?"
+
+He followed her still.
+
+"That is how I felt. These associations, that Park, the thought of my
+girlhood, of my mother, who understood me as no one else has since,
+assumed a certain value. New York became unbearable. It is just there,
+in the very centre of our modern civilization, that one sees the
+crudest passions. Oh, I have often wondered whether a man, however
+disillusioned, could see New York as a woman sees it when the glamour
+is gone. We are the natural prey of the conqueror still. We dream of
+independence--"
+
+She broke off abruptly.
+
+This confession, with the sudden glimpse it gave him of the fires within
+her that would not die down, but burned now more fiercely than ever,
+sent the blood to his head. His face, his temples, were hot with the
+fierceness of his joy in his conviction that she had revealed herself
+to him. Why she had done so, he could not say... This was the woman
+whom the world thought composed; who had triumphed over its opposition,
+compelled it to bow before her; who presented to it that self-possessed,
+unified personality by which he had been struck at their first meeting.
+Yet, paradoxically, the personality remained,--was more elusive than
+before. A thousand revelations, he felt, would not disclose it.
+
+He was no nearer to solving it now.. Yet the fires burned! She, too,
+like himself, was aflame and unsatisfied! She, too, had tasted success,
+and had revolted!
+
+"But I don't get anywhere," she said wearily. "At times I feel this
+ferment, this anger that things are as they are, only to realize what
+helpless anger it is. Why not take the world as it appears and live and
+feel, instead of beating against the currents?"
+
+"But isn't that inconsistent with what you said awhile ago as to a new
+civilization?" Hodder asked.
+
+"Oh, that Utopia has no reality for me. I think it has, at moments, but
+it fades. And I don't pretend to be consistent. Mr. Bentley lives in a
+world of his own; I envy him with all my heart, I love and admire him,
+he cheers and soothes me when I am with him. But I can't see--whatever
+he sees. I am only aware of a remorseless universe grinding out its
+destinies. We Anglo-Saxons are fond of deceiving ourselves about life,
+of dressing it up in beautiful colours, of making believe that it
+actually contains happiness. All our fiction reflects this--that is
+why I never cared to read English or American novels. The Continental
+school, the Russians, the Frenchmen, refuse to be deluded. They are
+honest."
+
+"Realism, naturalism," he mused, recalling a course in philosophy,
+"one would expect the Russian, in the conditions under which he lives,
+possessing an artistic temperament combined with a paralysis of the
+initiative and a sense of fate, to write in that way. And the
+Frenchmen, Renan, Zola, and the others who have followed, are equally
+deterministic, but viewing the human body as a highly organized machine
+with which we may amuse ourselves by registering its sensations. These
+literatures are true in so far as they reflect the characteristics
+of the nations from which they spring. That is not to say that the
+philosophies of which they are the expressions are true. Nor is it to
+admit that such a literature is characteristic of the spirit of America,
+and can be applied without change to our life and atmosphere. We have
+yet, I believe, to develop our own literature; which will come gradually
+as we find ourselves."
+
+"Find ourselves?" she repeated.
+
+"Yes. Isn't that what we are trying to do? We are not determinists or
+fatalists, and to condemn us to such a philosophy would be to destroy
+us. We live on hope. In spite of our apparent materialism, we are
+idealists. And is it not possible to regard nature as governed by
+laws--remorseless, if you like the word--and yet believe, with Kant and
+Goethe, that there is an inner realm? You yourself struggle--you cling
+to ideals."
+
+"Ideals!" she echoed. "Ideals are useless unless one is able to see, to
+feel something beyond this ruthless mechanism by which we are surrounded
+and hemmed in, to have some perception of another scheme. Why struggle,
+unless we struggle for something definite? Oh, I don't mean heavenly
+rewards. Nothing could be more insipid and senseless than the orthodox
+view of the hereafter. I am talking about a scheme of life here and
+now."
+
+"So am I," answered Hodder. "But may there not be a meaning in this very
+desire we have to struggle against the order of things as it appears to
+us?"
+
+"A meaning?"
+
+"A little while ago you spoke of your indignation at the inequalities
+and injustices of the world, and when I asked you if you had always felt
+this, you replied that this feeling had grown upon you. My question is
+this: whether that indignation would be present at all if it were not
+meant to be turned into action."
+
+"You believe that an influence is at work, an influence that impels us
+against our reason?"
+
+"I should like to think so," he said. "Why should so many persons be
+experiencing such a feeling to-day, persons who, like yourself, are the
+beneficiaries of our present system of privilege? Why should you, who
+have every reason to be satisfied, materially, with things as they are,
+be troubling yourself with thoughts of others who are less-fortunate?
+And why should we have the spectacle, today, of men and women all over
+this country in social work, in science and medicine and politics,
+striving to better conditions while most of them might be much more
+comfortable and luxurious letting well enough alone?"
+
+"But it's human to care," she objected.
+
+"Ah--human!" he said, and was silent. "What do we mean by human, unless
+it is the distinguishing mark of something within us that the natural
+world doesn't possess? Unless it is the desire and willingness to strive
+for a larger interest than the individual interest, work and suffer
+for others? And you spoke of making people happier. What do you mean
+by happiness? Not merely the possession of material comforts, surely.
+I grant you that those who are overworked and underfed, who are burning
+with the consciousness of wrongs, who have no outlook ahead, are
+essentially hopeless and miserable. But by 'happiness' you, mean
+something more than the complacency and contentment which clothing and
+food might bring, and the removal of the economic fear,--and even the
+restoration of self-respect."
+
+"That their lives should be fuller!" she exclaimed.
+
+"That drudgery and despair should be replaced by interest and hope," he
+went on, "slavery by freedom. In other words, that the whole attitude
+toward life should be changed, that life should appear a bright thing
+rather than a dark thing, that labour should be willing vicarious
+instead of forced and personal. Otherwise, any happiness worth having is
+out of the question."
+
+She was listening now with parted lips, apparently unconscious of the
+fixity of her gaze.
+
+"You mean it is a choice between that or nothing," she said, in a low
+voice. "That there is no use in lifting people out of the treadmill--and
+removing the terror of poverty unless you can give them something
+more--than I have got."
+
+"And something more--than I have got,"--he was suddenly moved to
+reply...
+
+Presently, while the silence still held between them, the door opened
+and startled them into reality. Mr. Bentley came in.
+
+The old gentleman gave no sign, as they rose to meet him, of a sense of
+tension in the atmosphere he had entered--yet each felt--somehow, that
+he knew. The tension was released. The same thought occurred to both as
+they beheld the peaceful welcome shining in his face, "Here is what we
+are seeking. Why try to define it?"
+
+"To think that I have been gossiping with Mrs. Meyer, while you were
+waiting for me!" he said. "She keeps the little florist's shop at the
+corner of Tower Street, and she gave me these. I little guessed what
+good use I should have for them, my dear."
+
+He held out to her three fragrant, crimson roses that matched the
+responsive colour in her cheeks as she thanked him and pinned them on
+her gown. He regarded her an instant.
+
+"But I'm sure Mr. Hodder has entertained you," Mr. Bentley turned, and
+laid his hand on the rector's shoulder.
+
+"Most successfully," said Alison, cutting short his protest. And she
+smiled at Hodder, faintly.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI. AMID THE ENCIRCLING GLOOM
+
+
+I
+
+Hodder, in spite of a pressing invitation to remain for supper, had left
+them together. He turned his face westward, in the opposite direction
+from the parish house, still under the spell of that moment of communion
+which had lasted--he knew not how long, a moment of silent revelation to
+them both. She, too, was storm-tossed! She, too, who had fared forth so
+gallantly into life, had conquered only to be beaten down--to lose her
+way.
+
+This discovery strained the very fibres of his being. So close he had
+been to her--so close that each had felt, simultaneously, complete
+comprehension of the other, comprehension that defied words, overbore
+disagreements. He knew that she had felt it. He walked on at first in
+a bewildered ecstasy, careless of aught else save that in a moment they
+two had reached out in the darkness and touched hands. Never had his
+experience known such communion, never had a woman meant what this woman
+meant, and yet he could not define that meaning. What need of religion,
+of faith in an unseen order when this existed? To have this woman in the
+midst of chaos would be enough!
+
+Faith in an unseen order! As he walked, his mind returned to the
+argument by which he had sought to combat her doubts--and his own.
+Whence had the argument come? It was new to him--he had never formulated
+it before--that pity and longing and striving were a justification and a
+proof. Had she herself inspired, by some unknown psychological law, this
+first attempt of his to reform the universe, this theory which he had
+rather spoken than thought? Or had it been the knowledge of her own
+longing, and his desire to assuage it? As twilight fell, as his spirits
+ebbed, he could not apply it now--it meant nothing to him, evaded him,
+there was in it no solace. To regain his footing once more, to climb
+again without this woman whom he needed, and might not have! Better to
+fall, to be engulfed... The vision of her, tall and straight, with the
+roses on her breast, tortured him.
+
+Thus ecstasy ebbed to despondency. He looked around him in the fading
+day, to find himself opposite the closed gates of the Botanical Gardens,
+in the southwestern portion of the city.... An hour later he had made
+his way back to Dalton Street with its sputtering blue lights and
+gliding figures, and paused for a moment on the far sidewalk to gaze at
+Mr. Bentley's gleaming windows. Should he go in? Had that personality
+suddenly lost its power over him? How strange that now he could see
+nothing glowing, nothing inspiring within that house,--only a kindly old
+man reading a newspaper!
+
+He walked on, slowly, to feel stealing on him that desperate longing for
+adventure which he had known so well in his younger days. And he did
+not resist. The terror with which it had once inspired him was gone,
+or lingered only in the form of a delicious sense of uncertainty and
+anticipation. Anything might happen to him--anything would be grateful;
+the thought of his study in the parish house was unbearable; the Dalton
+Street which had mocked and repelled him suddenly became alluring with
+its champaigns of light and inviting stretches of darkness. In the
+block ahead, rising out of the night like a tower blazing with a hundred
+beacons, Hodder saw a hotel, heard the faint yet eager throbbing
+of music, beheld silhouetted figures flitting from automobiles and
+carriages across the white glare of the pavement,--figures of men and
+women.
+
+He hastened his steps, the music grew louder and louder in his ears, he
+gained the ornamental posts crowned by their incandescent globes,
+made his way through the loiterers, descended the stone steps of the
+restaurant, and stood staring into it as at a blurred picture. The band
+crashed a popular two-step above the mingled voices and laughter. He sat
+down at a vacant table near the door, and presently became aware that a
+waiter had been for some time at his elbow.
+
+"What will you have, sir?"
+
+Then he remembered that he had not eaten, discovered that he was hungry,
+and ordered some sandwiches and beer. Still staring, the figures began
+to differentiate themselves, although they all appeared, somehow, in
+perpetual motion; hurrying, though seated. It was like gazing at a
+quivering cinematograph. Here and there ribbons of smoke curled upward,
+adding volume to the blue cloud that hung over the tables, which in turn
+was dissipated in spots by the industrious electric fans. Everywhere
+he looked he met the glances of women; even at the table next him, they
+were not so absorbed in their escorts as to be able to resist flinging
+him covert stares between the shrieks of laughter in which they
+intermittently indulged. The cumulative effect of all these faces was
+intoxicating, and for a long time he was unable to examine closely any
+one group. What he saw was a composite woman with flushed cheeks
+and soliciting eyes, becomingly gowned and hatted--to the masculine
+judgment. On the walls, heavily frescoed in the German style, he read,
+in Gothic letters:
+
+          "Wer liebt nicht Wein, Weib, and Gesang,
+          Er bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang."
+
+The waiter brought the sandwiches and beer, yet he did not eat. In the
+middle distance certain figures began insistently to stand out,--figures
+of women sitting alone wherever he looked he met a provoking gaze. One
+woman, a little farther away than the rest, seemed determinedly bent
+on getting a nod of recognition, and it was gradually borne in upon
+Hodder's consciousness that her features were familiar. In avoiding her
+eyes he studied the men at the next table,--or rather one of them, who
+loudly ordered the waiters about, who told brief anecdotes that were
+uproariously applauded; whose pudgy, bejewelled fingers were continually
+feeling for the bottle in the ice beside his chair, or nudging his
+companions with easy familiarity; whose little eyes, set in a heavy
+face, lighted now and again with a certain expression.....
+
+Suddenly Hodder pushed back his chair and got to his feet, overcome by a
+choking sensation like that of being, asphyxiated by foul gases. He
+must get out at once, or faint. What he had seen in the man's eyes had
+aroused in him sheer terror, for it was the image of something in
+his own soul which had summarily gained supremacy and led him hither,
+unresisting, to its own abiding-place. In vain he groped to reconstruct
+the process by which that other spirit--which he would fain have
+believed his true spirit--had been drugged and deadened in its very
+flight.
+
+He was aware, as he still stood uncertainly beside the table, of the
+white-aproned waiter looking at him, and of some one else!--the woman
+whose eyes had been fastened on him so persistently. She was close
+beside him, speaking to him.
+
+"Seems to me we've met before."
+
+He looked at her, at first uncomprehendingly, then with a
+dawning realization of her identity. Even her name came to him,
+unexpectedly,--Kate Marcy,--the woman in the flat!
+
+"Ain't you going to invite me to have some supper?" she whispered
+eagerly, furtively, as one accustomed to be rebuffed, yet bold in spite
+of it. "They'll throw me out if they think I'm accosting you."
+
+How was it that, a moment ago, she had appeared to him mysterious,
+inviting? At this range he could only see the paint on her cheeks,
+the shadows under her burning eyes, the shabby finery of her gown. Her
+wonderful bronze hair only made the contrast more pitiful. He acted
+automatically, drawing out for her the chair opposite his own, and sat
+down again.
+
+"Say, but I'm hungry!" she exclaimed, pulling off her gloves. She smiled
+at him, wanly, yet with a brazen coquettishness become habit.
+
+"Hungry!" he repeated idly.
+
+"I guess you'd be, if you'd only had a fried egg and a cup of coffee
+to-day, and nothing last night."
+
+He pushed over to her, hastily, with a kind of horror, the plate of
+sandwiches. She began eating them ravenously; but presently paused, and
+thrust them back toward him. He shook his head.
+
+"What's the matter with you?" she demanded.
+
+"Nothing," he replied.
+
+"You ordered them, didn't you? Ain't you eating anything?"
+
+"I'm not hungry," he said.
+
+She continued eating awhile without comment. And he watched her as one
+fascinated, oblivious to his surroundings, in a turmoil of thought and
+emotion.
+
+"I'm dry," she announced meaningly.
+
+He hesitated a moment, and then gave her the bottle of beer. She made a
+wry face as she poured it out.
+
+"Have they run out of champagne?" she inquired.
+
+This time he did not hesitate. The women of his acquaintance, at the
+dinner parties he attended, drank champagne. Why should he refuse it to
+this woman? A long-nosed, mediaeval-looking waiter was hovering about,
+one of those bizarre, battered creatures who have long exhausted the
+surprises of life, presiding over this amazing situation with all the
+sang froid of a family butler. Hodder told him to bring champagne.
+
+"What kind, sir?" he asked, holding out a card.
+
+"The best you have."
+
+The woman stared at him in wonder.
+
+"You're what an English Johnny I know would call a little bit of all
+right!" she declared with enthusiastic approval.
+
+"Since you are hungry," he went on, "suppose you have something more
+substantial than sandwiches. What would you like?"
+
+She did not answer at once. Amazement grew in her eyes, amazement and a
+kind of fear.
+
+"Quit joshing!" she implored him, and he found it difficult to cope with
+her style of conversation. For a while she gazed helplessly at the bill
+of fare.
+
+"I guess you'll think it's funny," she said hesitatingly, "but I feel
+just like a good beefsteak and potatoes. Bring a thick one, Walter."
+
+The waiter sauntered off.
+
+"Why should I think it strange?" Hodder asked.
+
+"Well, if you knew how many evenings I've sat up there in my room and
+thought what I'd order if I ever again got hold of some rich guy who'd
+loosen up. There ain't any use trying to put up a bluff with you.
+Nothing was too good for me once, caviar, pate de foie gras" (her
+pronunciation is not to be imitated), "chicken casserole, peach Melba,
+filet of beef with mushrooms,--I've had 'em all, and I used to sit up
+and say I'd hand out an order like that. You never do what you think
+you're going to do in this life."
+
+The truth of this remark struck him with a force she did not suspect;
+stung him, as it were, into a sense of reality.
+
+"And now," she added pathetically, "all t want is a beefsteak! Don't
+that beat you?"
+
+She appeared so genuinely surprised at this somewhat contemptible trick
+fate had played her that Hodder smiled in spite of himself.
+
+"I didn't recognize you at first in that get-up," she observed, looking
+at his blue serge suit. "So you've dropped the preacher business, have
+you? You're wise, all right."
+
+"Why do you say that?" he asked.
+
+"Didn't I tell you when you came 'round that time that you weren't like
+the rest of 'em? You're too human."
+
+Once more the word, and on her lips, startled him.
+
+"Some of the best men I have ever known, the broadest and most
+understanding men, have been clergymen," he found himself protesting.
+
+"Well, they haven't dropped in on me. The only one I ever saw that
+measured up to something like that was you, and now you've chucked it."
+
+Had he, as she expressed the matter, "chucked it"? Her remark brought
+him reluctantly, fearfully, remorselessly--agitated and unprepared as he
+was--face to face with his future.
+
+"You were too good for the job," she declared. "What is there in it?
+There ain't nobody converted these days that I can see, and what's the
+use of gettin' up and preach into a lot of sapheads that don't know what
+religion is? Sure they don't."
+
+"Do you?" he asked.
+
+"You've called my bluff." She laughed. "Say, do YOU? If there was
+anything in it you'd have kept on preachin' to that bunch and made some
+of 'em believe they was headed for hell; you'd have made one of 'em
+that owns the flat house I live in, who gets fancy rents out of us poor
+girls, give it up. That's a nice kind of business for a church member,
+ain't it?"
+
+"Owns the house in which you live!"
+
+"Sure." She smiled at him compassionately, pitying his innocence and
+ignorance. "Now I come to think of it, I guess he don't go to your
+church,--it's the big Baptist church on the boulevard. But what's the
+difference?"
+
+"None," said Hodder, despondently.
+
+She regarded him curiously.
+
+"You remember when you dropped in that night, when the kid was sick?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Well, now you ain't in the business any more, I may as well tell you
+you kind of got in on me. I was sorry for you--honest, I was. I couldn't
+believe at first you was on the level, but it didn't take me long to see
+that they had gold-bricked you, too. I saw you weren't wise to what they
+were."
+
+"You thought--" he began and paused dumfounded.
+
+"Why not?" she retorted. "It looked easy to me,--your line. How was I to
+know at first that they had you fooled? How was I to know you wasn't in
+the game?"
+
+"The game?"
+
+"Say, what else is it but a game? You must be on now, ain't you? Why. do
+they put up to keep the churches going? There ain't any coupons coming
+out of 'em.
+
+"Maybe some of these millionaires think they can play all the horses and
+win,--get into heaven and sell gold bricks on the side. But I guess most
+of 'em don't think about heaven. They just use the church for a front,
+and take in strangers in the back alley,--downtown."
+
+Hodder was silent, overwhelmed by the brutal aptness of her figures. Nor
+did he take the trouble of a defence, of pointing out that hers was not
+the whole truth. What really mattered--he saw--was what she and those
+like her thought. Such minds were not to be disabused by argument; and
+indeed he had little inclination for it then.
+
+"There's nothing in it."
+
+By this expression he gathered she meant life. And some hidden impulse
+bade him smile at her.
+
+"There is this," he answered.
+
+She opened her mouth, closed it and stared at him, struck by his
+expression, striving uneasily to fathom hidden depths in his remark.
+
+"I don't get on to you," she said lamely. "I didn't that other time. I
+never ran across anybody like you."
+
+He tried to smile again.
+
+"You mustn't mind me," he answered.
+
+They fell into an oasis of silence, surrounded by mad music and
+laughter. Then came the long-nosed waiter carrying the beefsteak aloft,
+followed by a lad with a bucket of ice, from which protruded the green
+and gold neck of a bottle. The plates were put down, the beefsteak
+carved, the champagne opened and poured out with a flourish. The woman
+raised her glass.
+
+"Here's how!" she said, with an attempt at gayety. And she drank to him.
+"It's funny how I ran across you again, ain't it?" She threw back her
+head and laughed.
+
+He raised his glass, tasted the wine, and put it down again. A sheet of
+fire swept through him.
+
+"What's the matter with it? Is it corked?" she demanded. "It goes to the
+right spot with me."
+
+"It seems very good," he said, trying to smile, and turning to the food
+on his plate. The very idea of eating revolted him--and yet he made
+the attempt: he had a feeling, ill defined, that consequences of vital
+importance depended upon this attempt, on his natural acceptance of the
+situation. And, while he strove to reduce the contents of his plate, he
+racked his brain for some subject of conversation. The flamboyant walls
+of the room pressed in on every side; comment of that which lay within
+their limits was impossible,--but he could not, somehow, get beyond
+them. Was there in the whole range of life one easy topic which they
+might share in common? Yet a bond existed between this woman and
+himself--a bond of which he now became aware, and which seemed strangely
+to grow stronger as the minutes passed and no words were spoken. Why
+was it that she, too, to whom speech came so easily, had fallen dumb?
+He began to long for some remark, however disconcerting. The tension
+increased.
+
+She put down her knife and fork. Tears sprang into her eyes,--tears of
+anger, he thought.
+
+"Say, it's no use trying to put up a bluff with me," she cried.
+
+"Why do you say that?" he asked.
+
+"You know what I mean, all right. What did you come in here for,
+anyway?"
+
+"I don't know--I couldn't tell you," he answered.
+
+The very honesty of his words seemed, for an instant, to disconcert her;
+and she produced a torn lace handkerchief, which she thrust in her eyes.
+
+"Why can't you leave me alone?" she demanded. "I'm all right."
+
+If he did not at once reply, it was because of some inner change which
+had taken place in himself; and he seemed to see things, suddenly,
+in their true proportions. He no longer feared a scene and its
+consequences. By virtue of something he had cast off or taken on, he was
+aware of a newly acquired mastery of the situation, and by a hidden and
+unconscious process he had managed to get at the real woman behind the
+paint: had beaten down, as it were without a siege, her defences. And he
+was incomparably awed by the sight of her quivering, frightened self.
+
+Her weeping grew more violent. He saw the people at the next table
+turn and stare, heard the men laughing harshly. For the spectacle was
+evidently not an uncommon one here. She pushed away her unfinished
+glass, gathered up her velvet bag and rose abruptly.
+
+"I guess I ain't hungry after all," she said, and started toward the
+door. He turned to the waiter, who regarded him unmoved, and asked for a
+check.
+
+"I'll get it," he said.
+
+Hodder drew out a ten dollar bill, and told him to keep the change. The
+waiter looked at him. Some impulse moved him to remark, as he picked up
+the rector's hat:
+
+"Don't let her put it over you, sir."
+
+Hodder scarcely heard him. He hurried up the steps and gained the
+pavement, and somewhere in the black shadows beyond the arc-lights
+he saw her disappearing down the street. Careless of all comment he
+hastened on, overtook her, and they walked rapidly side by side. Now and
+again he heard a sob, but she said nothing. Thus they came to the house
+where the Garvins had lived, and passed it, and stopped in front of the
+dimly lighted vestibule of the flats next door. In drawing the key from
+her bag she dropped it: he picked it up and put it in the lock himself.
+She led the way without comment up the darkened stairs, and on the
+landing produced another key, opened the door of her rooms, fumbled for
+the electric button, and suddenly the place was flooded with light. He
+glanced in, and recoiled.
+
+
+
+II
+
+Oddly enough, the first thing he noticed in the confusion that reigned
+was the absence of the piano. Two chairs were overturned, and one of
+them was broken; a siphon of vichy lay on the floor beside a crushed
+glass and two or three of the cheap ornaments that had been swept off
+the mantel and broken on the gaudy tiles of the hearth. He glanced at
+the woman, who had ceased crying, and stood surveying the wreckage with
+the calmness, the philosophic nonchalance of a class that comes to look
+upon misfortune as inevitable.
+
+"They didn't do a thing to this place, did they?" was her comment.
+"There was two guys in here to-night who got a notion they were funny."
+
+Hodder had thought to have fathomed all the horrors of her existence,
+but it was not until he looked into this room that the bottomless
+depths of it were brought home to him. Could it be possible that the
+civilization in which he lived left any human being so defenceless as to
+be at the mercy of the ghouls who had been here? The very stale odours
+of the spilled whiskey seemed the material expression of the essence
+of degraded souls; for a moment it overpowered him. Then came the
+imperative need of action, and he began to right one of the chairs. She
+darted forward.
+
+"Cut it out!" she cried. "What business have you got coming in here and
+straightening up? I was a fool to bring you, anyway."
+
+It was in her eyes that he read her meaning, and yet could not credit
+it. He was abashed--ashamed; nay, he could not define the feeling in
+his breast. He knew that what he read was the true interpretation of
+her speech, for in some manner--he guessed not how--she had begun to
+idealize him, to feel that the touch of these things defiled him.
+
+"I believe I invited myself," he answered, with attempted cheerfulness.
+Then it struck him, in his predicament, that this was precisely what
+others had done!
+
+"When you asked me a little while ago whether I had left the Church, I
+let you think I had. I am still connected with St. John's, but I do not
+know how long I shall continue to be."
+
+She was on her knees with dustpan and whiskbroom, cleaning up the
+fragments of glass on the stained carpet. And she glanced up at him
+swiftly, diviningly.
+
+"Say--you're in trouble yourself, ain't you?"
+
+She got up impulsively, spilling some of the contents of the pan. A
+subtle change had come in her, and under the gallantly drooping feathers
+of her hat he caught her eye--the human eye that so marvellously
+reflects the phases of the human soul: the eye which so short a time
+before hardily and brazenly had flashed forth its invitation, now
+actually shone with fellowship and sympathy. And for a moment this look
+was more startling, more appalling than the other; he shrank from it,
+resented it even more. Was it true that they had something in common?
+And if so, was it sin or sorrow, or both?
+
+"I might have known," she said, staring at him. In spite of his gesture
+of dissent, he saw that she was going over the events of the evening
+from her new point of view.
+
+"I might have known, when we were sitting there in Harrods, that you
+were up against it, too, but I couldn't think of anything but the way I
+was fixed. The agent's been here twice this week for the rent, and I was
+kind of desperate for a square meal."
+
+Hodder took the dustpan from her hand, and flung its contents into the
+fireplace.
+
+"Then we are both fortunate," he said, "to have met each other."
+
+"I don't see where you come in," she told him.
+
+He turned and smiled at her.
+
+"Do you remember when I was here that evening about two months ago I
+said I should like to be your friend? Well, I meant it. And I have often
+hoped, since then, that some circumstance might bring us together again.
+You seemed to think that no friendship was possible between us, but I
+have tried to make myself believe that you said so because you didn't
+know me."
+
+"Honest to God?" she asked. "Is that on the level?"
+
+"I only ask for an opportunity to prove it," he replied, striving to
+speak naturally. He stooped and laid the dustpan on the hearth. "There!
+Now let's sit down."
+
+She sank on the sofa, her breast rising and falling, her gaze dumbly
+fixed on him, as one under hypnosis. He took the rocker.
+
+"I have wanted to tell you how grateful Mrs. Garvin, the boy's
+mother--was for the roses you brought. She doesn't know who sent them,
+but I intend to tell her, and she will thank you herself. She is living
+out in the country. And the boy--you would scarcely recognize him."
+
+"I couldn't play the piano for a week after--that thing happened." She
+glanced at the space where the instrument had stood.
+
+"You taught yourself to play?" he asked.
+
+"I had music lessons."
+
+"Music lessons?"
+
+"Not here--before I left home--up the State, in a little country
+town,--Madison. It seems like a long time ago, but it's only seven years
+in September. Mother and father wanted all of us children to know a
+little more than they did, and I guess they pinched a good deal to give
+us a chance. I went a year to the high school, and then I was all for
+coming to the city--I couldn't stand Madison, there wasn't anything
+going on. Mother was against it,--said I was too good-looking to leave
+home. I wish I never had. You wouldn't believe I was good-looking once,
+would you?"
+
+She spoke dispassionately, not seeming to expect assent, but Hodder
+glanced involuntarily at her wonderful crown of hair. She had taken off
+her hat. He was thinking of the typical crime of American parents,--and
+suddenly it struck him that her speech had changed, that she had dropped
+the suggestive slang of the surroundings in which she now lived.
+
+"I was a fool to come, but I couldn't see it then. All I could think of
+was to get away to a place where something was happening. I wanted to
+get into Ferguson's--everybody in Madison knew about Ferguson's, what a
+grand store it was,--but I couldn't. And after a while I got a place at
+the embroidery counter at Pratt's. That's a department store, too, you
+know. It looked fine, but it wasn't long before I fell wise to a few
+things." (She relapsed into slang occasionally.) "Have you ever tried
+to stand on your feet for nine hours, where you couldn't sit down for
+a minute? Say, when Florry Kinsley and me--she was the girl I roomed
+with--would get home at night, often we'd just lie down and laugh
+and cry, we were so tired, and our feet hurt so. We were too used up
+sometimes to get up and cook supper on the little stove we had. And
+sitting around a back bedroom all evening was worse than Madison. We'd
+go out, tired as we were, and walk the streets."
+
+He nodded, impressed by the fact that she did not seem to be appealing
+to his sympathy. Nor, indeed, did she appear--in thus picking up the
+threads of her past--to be consciously accounting for her present. She
+recognized no causation there.
+
+"Say, did you ever get to a place where you just had to have something
+happen? When you couldn't stand bein' lonely night after night, when you
+went out on the streets and saw everybody on the way to a good time but
+you? We used to look in the newspapers for notices of the big balls,
+and we'd take the cars to the West End and stand outside the awnings
+watching the carriages driving up and the people coming in. And the same
+with the weddings. We got to know a good many of the swells by sight.
+There was Mrs. Larrabbee,"--a certain awe crept into her voice--"and
+Miss Ferguson--she's sweet--and a lot more. Some of the girls used to
+copy their clothes and hats, but Florry and me tried to live honest. It
+was funny," she added irrelevantly, "but the more worn out we were at
+night, the more we'd want a little excitement, and we used to go to the
+dance-halls and keep going until we were ready to drop."
+
+She laughed at the recollection.
+
+"There was a floorwalker who never let me alone the whole time I was at
+Pratt's--he put me in mind of a pallbearer. His name was Selkirk, and
+he had a family in Westerly, out on the Grade Suburban.... Some of the
+girls never came back at all, except to swagger in and buy expensive
+things, and tell us we were fools to work. And after a while I noticed
+Florry was getting discouraged. We never had so much as a nickel left
+over on Saturdays and they made us sign a paper, when they hired us,
+that we lived at home. It was their excuse for paying us six dollars
+a week. They do it at Ferguson's, too. They say they can get plenty of
+girls who do live at home. I made up my mind I'd go back to Madison, but
+I kept putting it off, and then father died, and I couldn't!
+
+"And then, one day, Florry left. She took her things from the room when
+I was at the store, and I never saw her again. I got another roommate.
+I couldn't afford to pay for the room alone. You wouldn't believe I kept
+straight, would you?" she demanded, with a touch of her former defiance.
+"I had plenty of chances better than that floorwalker. But I knew I was
+good looking, and I thought if I could only hold out I might get married
+to some fellow who was well fixed. What's the matter?"
+
+Hodder's exclamation had been involuntary, for in these last words she
+had unconsciously brought home to him the relentless predicament in
+the lives of these women. She had been saving herself--for what? A more
+advantageous, sale!
+
+"It's always been my luck," she went on reflectingly, "that when what I
+wanted to happen did happen, I never could take advantage of it. It was
+just like that to-night, when you handed me out the bill of fare, and
+I ordered beefsteak. And it was like that when--when he came along--I
+didn't do what I thought I was going to do. It's terrible to fall in
+love, isn't it? I mean the real thing. I've read in books that it only
+comes once, and I guess it's so."
+
+Fortunately she seemed to expect no answer to this query. She was
+staring at the wall with unseeing eyes.
+
+"I never thought of marrying him, from the first. He could have done
+anything with me--he was so good and generous--and it was him I was
+thinking about. That's love, isn't it? Maybe you don't believe a woman
+like me knows what love is. You've got a notion that goin' downhill,
+as I've been doing, kills it, haven't you? I Wish to God it did--but
+it don't: the ache's there, and sometimes it comes in the daytime, and
+sometimes at night, and I think I'll go crazy. When a woman like me is
+in love there isn't anything more terrible on earth, I tell you. If a
+girl's respectable and good it's bad enough, God knows, if she can't
+have the man she wants; but when she's like me--it's hell. That's the
+only way I can describe it. She feels there is nothing about her that's
+clean, that he wouldn't despise. There's many a night I wished I could
+have done what Garvin did, but I didn't have the nerve."
+
+"Don't say that!" he commanded sharply.
+
+"Why not? It's the best way out."
+
+"I can see how one might believe it to be," he answered. Indeed,
+it seemed that his vision had been infinitely extended, that he had
+suddenly come into possession of the solution of all the bewildered,
+despairing gropings of the human soul. Only awhile ago, for instance,
+the mood of self-destruction had been beyond his imagination: tonight
+he understood it, though he still looked upon it with horror. And he saw
+that his understanding of her--or of any human being--could never be of
+the intellect. He had entered into one of those astounding yet simple
+relationships wherein truth, and truth alone, is possible. He knew that
+such women lied, deceived themselves; he could well conceive that
+the image of this first lover might have become idealized in her
+vicissitudes; that the memories of the creature-comforts, of first
+passion, might have enhanced as the victim sank. It was not only because
+she did not attempt to palliate that he believed her.
+
+"I remember the time I met him,--it was only four years ago last spring,
+but it seems like a lifetime. It was Decoration Day, and it was so
+beautiful I went out with another girl to the Park, and we sat on the
+grass and looked at the sky and wished we lived in the country. He was
+in an automobile; I never did know exactly how it happened,--we looked
+at each other, and he slowed up and came back and asked us to take a
+ride. I had never been in one of those things--but that wasn't why I
+went, I guess. Well, the rest was easy. He lost his head, and I was just
+as bad. You wouldn't believe me if I told you how rich he was: it scared
+me when I found out about him, and he was so handsome and full of fun
+and spirits, and generous! I never knew anybody like him. Honest, I
+never expected he'd want to marry me. He didn't at first,--it was only
+after a while. I never asked him to, and when he began to talk about it
+I told him it would cut him off from his swell friends, and I knew his
+father might turn him loose. Oh, it wasn't the money! Well, he'd get mad
+all through, and say he never got along with the old man, and that his
+friends would have to take me, and he couldn't live without me. He said
+he would have me educated, and bought me books, and I tried to read
+them. I'd have done anything for him. He'd knocked around a good deal
+since he'd been to Harvard College,--he wasn't what you'd call a saint,
+but his heart was all right. And he changed, too, I could see it. He
+said he was going to make something out of himself.
+
+"I didn't think it was possible to be so happy, but I had a feeling all
+along, inside of me, that it couldn't come off. I had a little flat in
+Rutger Street, over on the south side, and everything in the world I
+wanted. Well, one day, sure enough, the bell rang and I opened the door,
+and there stood a man with side whiskers staring at me, and staring
+until I was frightened to death. I never saw such eyes as he had. And
+all of a sudden I knew it was his father.
+
+"'Is this Miss Marcy?'" he said.
+
+"I couldn't say anything at all, but he handed me his card and smiled,
+I'll never forget how he smiled--and came right in and sat down. I'd
+heard of that man all my life, and how much money he'd made, and all
+that. Why, up in Madison folks used to talk about him--" she checked
+herself suddenly and stared at Hodder in consternation. "Maybe you know
+him!" she exclaimed. "I never thought!"
+
+"Maybe I do," he assented wearily. In the past few moments suspicion had
+become conviction.
+
+"Well--what difference does it make--now? It's all over, and I'm not
+going to bother him. I made up my mind I wouldn't, on account of him,
+you understand. I never fell that low--thank God!"
+
+Hodder nodded. He could not speak.... The woman seemed to be living over
+again that scene, in her imagination.
+
+"I just couldn't realize who it was sitting there beside me, but if I
+hadn't known it wouldn't have made any difference. He could have done
+anything with me, anyway, and he knew how to get at me. He said, now
+that he'd seen me, that he was sure I was a good girl at the bottom and
+loved his son, and that I wouldn't want to ruin the boy when he had such
+a big future ahead of him. I wouldn't have thought, to look at the man,
+that he could have been so gentle. I made a fool of myself and cried,
+and told him I'd go away and never see his son any more--that I'd always
+been against marrying him. Well, he almost had tears in his eyes when he
+thanked me and said I'd never regret it, and he pulled an envelope out
+of his pocket. I said I wouldn't take any money, and gave it back
+to him. I've always been sorry since that I didn't make him take it
+back--it never did anything but harm to me. But he had his way. He laid
+it on the table and said he wouldn't feel right, and took my hand--and I
+just didn't care.
+
+"Well, what do you think I did after he'd gone? I went and played a
+piece on the piano,--and I never can bear to hear that ragtime to this
+day. I couldn't seem to feel anything. And after a while I got up
+and opened the envelope--it was full of crackly new hundred dollar
+bills--thirty of 'em, and as I sat there staring at 'em the pain came
+on, like a toothache, in throbs, getting worse all the time until I just
+couldn't stand it. I had a notion of sending the money back even then,
+but I didn't. I didn't know how to do it,--and as I told you, I wasn't
+able to care much. Then I remembered I'd promised to go away, and I had
+to have some money for that, and if I didn't leave right off I wouldn't
+have the strength to do it. I hadn't even thought where to go: I
+couldn't think, so I got dressed and went down to the depot anyway. It
+was one of those bright, bitter cold winter days after a thaw when the
+icicles are hanging everywhere. I went inside and walked up and down
+that long platform under the glass roof. My, it was cold in there! I
+looked over all the signs, and made up my mind I'd go to Chicago.
+
+"I meant to work, I never meant to spend the money, but to send it back.
+I'd put it aside--and then I'd go and take a little. Say, it was easy
+not to work--and I didn't care what happened to me as long as I wasn't
+going to see him again. Well, I'm not trying to smooth it over, I
+suppose there was something crooked about me from the start, but I just
+went clean to hell with that money, and when I heard he'd gone away, I
+came back here."
+
+"Something crooked!" The words rang in Hodder's ears, in his very soul.
+How was he or any man to estimate, to unravel the justice from the
+injustice, to pass upon the merit of this woman's punishment? Here
+again, in this vitiated life, was only to be seen the remorseless
+working of law--cause and effect. Crooked! Had not the tree been crooked
+from the beginning--incapable of being straightened? She had herself
+naively confessed it. Was not the twist ingrained? And if so, where was
+the salvation he had preached? There was good in her still,--but what
+was "good"?... He took no account of his profound compassion.
+
+What comfort could he give her, what hope could he hold out that the
+twist, now gnarled and knotted, might be removed, that she might gain
+peace of soul and body and the "happiness" of which he had talked with
+Alison Parr?... He raised his eyes, to discover that the woman's were
+fixed upon him, questioningly.
+
+"I suppose I was a fool to tell you," she said, with a shade of her
+old bitterness; "it can't do any good." Her next remark was startlingly
+astute. "You've found out for yourself, I guess, that all this talk
+about heaven and hell and repentance don't amount to anything. Hell
+couldn't be any worse than I've been through, no matter how hot it is.
+And heaven!" She laughed, burst into tears, and quickly dried them.
+"You know the man I've been talking about, that bought me off. I didn't
+intend to tell you, but I see you can't help knowing--Eldon Parr. I
+don't say he didn't do right from his way of looking at things,--but
+say, it wasn't exactly Christian, was it?"
+
+"No," he said, "it wasn't." He bowed his head, and presently, when
+he raised it again, he caught something in her look that puzzled and
+disturbed him--an element of adoration.
+
+"You're white through and through," she said, slowly and distinctly.
+
+And he knew not how to protest.
+
+"I'll tell you something," she went on, as one who has made a discovery.
+"I liked you the first time you came in here--that night--when you
+wanted me to be friends; well, there was something that seemed to make
+it impossible then. I felt it, if you didn't." She groped for words. "I
+can't explain what it was, but now it's gone. You're different. I think
+a lot more of you. Maybe it's because of what you did at Harrod's,
+sitting down with me and giving me supper when I was so hungry, and the
+champagne. You weren't ashamed of me."
+
+"Good God, why should I have been!" he exclaimed.
+
+"You! Why shouldn't you?" she cried fiercely.
+
+"There's hardly a man in that place that wouldn't have been. They all
+know me by sight--and some of 'em better. You didn't see 'em grinning
+when I came up to you, but I did. My God--it's awful--it's awful I...."
+She burst into violent weeping, long deferred.
+
+He took her hand in his, and did not speak, waiting for the fit to spend
+itself.... And after a while the convulsive shudders that shook her
+gradually ceased.
+
+"You must trust me," he said. "The first thing tomorrow I'm going to
+make arrangements for you to get out of these rooms. You can't stay here
+any longer."
+
+"That's sure," she answered, trying to smile. "I'm broke. I even owe the
+co--the policeman."
+
+"The policeman!"
+
+"He has to turn it in to Tom Beatty and the politicians"
+
+Beatty! Where had he heard the name? Suddenly it came to him that Beatty
+was the city boss, who had been eulogized by Mr. Plimpton!
+
+"I have some good friends who will be glad to help you to get work--and
+until you do get work. You will have to fight--but we all have to fight.
+Will you try?"
+
+"Sure, I'll try," she answered, in a low voice.
+
+Her very tone of submission troubled him. And he had a feeling that, if
+he had demanded, she would have acquiesced in anything.
+
+"We'll talk it over to-morrow," he went on, clinging to his note of
+optimism. "We'll find out what you can do easiest, to begin with."
+
+"I might give music lessons," she suggested.
+
+The remark increased his uneasiness, for he recognized in it a sure
+symptom of disease--a relapse into what might almost have been called
+levity, blindness to the supreme tragedy of her life which but a moment
+before had shaken and appalled her. He shook his head bravely.
+
+"I'm afraid that wouldn't do--at first."
+
+She rose and went into the other room, returning in a few moments with
+a work basket, from which she drew a soiled and unfinished piece of
+embroidery.
+
+"There's a bureau cover I started when I was at Pratt's," she said, as
+she straightened it over her knees. "It's a copy of an expensive one. I
+never had the patience to finish it, but one of the sales-ladies there,
+who was an expert, told me it was pretty good: She taught me the stitch,
+and I had a notion at that time I might make a little money for dresses
+and the theatre. I was always clever with my hands."
+
+"The very thing!" he said, with hopeful emphasis. "I'm sure I can get
+you plenty of it to do. And I'll come back in the morning."
+
+He gave it back to her, and as she was folding it his glance fell on a
+photograph in the basket.
+
+"I kept it, I don't know why," he heard her say; "I didn't have the
+heart to burn it."
+
+He started recovered himself, and rose.
+
+"I'll go to see the agent the first thing to-morrow," he said. "And
+then--you'll be ready for me? You trust me?"
+
+"I'd do anything for you," was her tremulous reply.
+
+Her disquieting, submissive smile haunted him as he roped his way down
+the stairs to the street, and then the face in the photograph replaced
+it--the laughing eyes, the wilful, pleasure--loving mouth he had seen in
+the school and college pictures of Preston Parr.
+
+
+
+
+Volume 5.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII. RECONSTRUCTION
+
+
+I
+
+Life had indeed become complicated, paradoxical. He, John Hodder, a
+clergyman, rector of St. John's by virtue of not having resigned,
+had entered a restaurant of ill repute, had ordered champagne for an
+abandoned woman, and had no sense of sin when he awoke the next morning!
+The devil, in the language of orthodox theology, had led him there. He
+had fallen under the influence of the tempter of his youth, and all in
+him save the carnal had been blotted out.
+
+More paradoxes! If the devil had not taken possession of him and led him
+there, it were more than probable that he could never have succeeded
+in any other way in getting on a footing of friendship with this woman,
+Kate Marcy. Her future, to be sure, was problematical. Here was no
+simple, sentimental case he might formerly have imagined, of trusting
+innocence betrayed, but a mixture of good and evil, selfishness and
+unselfishness. And she had, in spite of all, known the love which
+effaces self! Could the disintegration, in her case, be arrested?
+
+Gradually Hodder was filled with a feeling which may be called amazement
+because, although his brain was no nearer to a solution than before, he
+was not despondent. For a month he had not permitted his mind to dwell
+on the riddle; yet this morning he felt stirring within him a new energy
+for which he could not account, a hope unconnected with any mental
+process! He felt in touch, once more, faintly but perceptibly, with
+something stable in the chaos. In bygone years he had not seen the
+chaos, but the illusion of an orderly world, a continual succession of
+sunrises, 'couleur de rose', from the heights above Bremerton. Now were
+the scales fallen from his eyes; now he saw the evil, the injustice,
+the despair; felt, in truth, the weight of the sorrow of it all, and yet
+that sorrow was unaccountably transmuted, as by a chemical process, into
+something which for the first time had a meaning--he could not say what
+meaning. The sting of despair had somehow been taken out of it, and it
+remained poignant!
+
+Not on the obsession of the night before, when he had walked down Dalton
+Street and beheld it transformed into a realm of adventure, but upon his
+past life did he look back now with horror, upon the even tenor of those
+days and years in the bright places. His had been the highroad of a
+fancied security, from which he had feared to stray, to seek his God
+across the rough face of nature, from black, forgotten capons to the
+flying peaks in space. He had feared reality. He had insisted upon
+gazing at the universe through the coloured glasses of an outworn
+theology, instead of using his own eyes.
+
+So he had left the highroad, the beaten way of salvation many others had
+deserted, had flung off his spectacles, had plunged into reality, to be
+scratched and battered, to lose his way. Not until now had something of
+grim zest come to him, of an instinct which was the first groping of a
+vision, as to where his own path might lie. Through what thickets and
+over what mountains he knew not as yet--nor cared to know. He felt
+resistance, whereas on the highroad he had felt none. On the highroad
+his cry had gone unheeded and unheard, yet by holding out his hand in
+the wilderness he had helped another, bruised and bleeding, to her feet!
+Salvation, Let it be what it might be, he would go on, stumbling and
+seeking, through reality.
+
+Even this last revelation, of Eldon Parr's agency in another tragedy,
+seemed to have no further power to affect him... Nor could Hodder think
+of Alison as in blood-relationship to the financier, or even to the boy,
+whose open, pleasure-loving face he had seen in the photograph.
+
+
+
+II
+
+A presage of autumn was in the air, and a fine, misty rain drifted in
+at his windows as he sat at his breakfast. He took deep breaths of the
+moisture, and it seemed to water and revive his parching soul. He found
+himself, to his surprise, surveying with equanimity the pile of books in
+the corner which had led him to the conviction of the emptiness of the
+universe--but the universe was no longer empty! It was cruel, but a
+warring force was at work in it which was not blind, but directed. He
+could not say why this was so, but he knew it, he felt it, sensed its
+energy within him as he set out for Dalton Street.
+
+He was neither happy nor unhappy, but in equilibrium, walking with sure
+steps, and the anxiety in which he had fallen asleep the night before
+was gone: anxiety lest the woman should have fled, or changed her mind,
+or committed some act of desperation.
+
+In Dalton Street a thin coat of yellow mud glistened on the asphalt, but
+even the dreariness of this neighbourhood seemed transient. He rang the
+bell of the flat, the door swung open, and in the hall above a woman
+awaited him. She was clad in black.
+
+"You wouldn't know me, would you?" she inquired. "Say, I scarcely know
+myself. I used to wear this dress at Pratt's, with white collars and
+cuffs and--well, I just put it on again. I had it in the bottom of my
+trunk, and I guessed you'd like it."
+
+"I didn't know you at first," he said, and the pleasure in his face was
+her reward.
+
+The transformation, indeed, was more remarkable than he could have
+believed possible, for respectability itself would seem to have been
+regained by a costume, and the abundance of her remarkable hair was now
+repressed. The absence of paint made her cheeks strangely white, the
+hollows under the eyes darker. The eyes themselves alone betrayed the
+woman of yesterday; they still burned.
+
+"Why," he exclaimed, looking around him, "you have been busy, haven't
+you?"
+
+"I've been up since six," she told him proudly. The flat had been
+dismantled of its meagre furniture, the rug was rolled up and tied,
+and a trunk strapped with rope was in the middle of the floor. Her next
+remark brought home to him the full responsibility of his situation. She
+led him to the window, and pointed to a spot among the drenched weeds
+and rubbish in the yard next door. "Do you see that bottle? That's
+the first thing I did--flung it out there. It didn't break," she added
+significantly, "and there are three drinks in it yet."
+
+Once more he confined his approval to his glance.
+
+"Now you must come and have some breakfast," he said briskly. "If I had
+thought about it I should have waited to have it with you."
+
+"I'm not hungry." In the light of his new knowledge, he connected her
+sudden dejection with the sight of the bottle.
+
+"But you must eat. You're exhausted from all this work. And a cup of
+coffee will make all the difference in the world."
+
+She yielded, pinning on her hat. And he led her, holding the umbrella
+over her, to a restaurant in Tower Street, where a man in a white cap
+and apron was baking cakes behind a plate-glass window. She drank the
+coffee, but in her excitement left the rest of the breakfast almost
+untasted.
+
+"Say," she asked him once, "why are you doing this?"
+
+"I don't know," he answered, "except that it gives me pleasure."
+
+"Pleasure?"
+
+"Yes. It makes me feel as if I were of some use."
+
+She considered this.
+
+"Well," she observed, reviled by the coffee, "you're the queerest
+minister I ever saw."
+
+When they had reached the pavement she asked him where they were going.
+
+"To see a friend of mine, and a friend of yours," he told her. "He does
+net live far from here."
+
+She was silent again, acquiescing. The rain had stopped, the sun was
+peeping out furtively through the clouds, the early loiterers in Dalton
+Street stared at them curiously. But Hodder was thinking of that house
+whither they were bound with a new gratitude, a new wonder that it
+should exist. Thus they came to the sheltered vestibule with its
+glistening white paint, its polished name plate and doorknob. The
+grinning, hospitable darky appeared in answer to the rector's ring.
+
+"Good morning, Sam," he said; "is Mr. Bentley in?"
+
+Sam ushered them ceremoniously into the library, and gate Marcy
+gazed about her with awe, as at something absolutely foreign to her
+experience: the New Barrington Hotel, the latest pride of the city,
+recently erected at the corner of Tower and Jefferson and furnished
+in the French style, she might partially have understood. Had she been
+marvellously and suddenly transported and established there, existence
+might still have evinced a certain continuity. But this house!..
+
+Mr. Bentley rose from the desk in the corner.
+
+"Oh, it's you, Hodder," he said cheerfully, laying his hand on the
+rector's arm. "I was just thinking about you."
+
+"This is Miss Marcy, Mr. Bentley," Hodder said.
+
+Mr. Bentley took her hand and led her to a chair.
+
+"Mr. Hodder knows how fond I am of young women," he said. "I have six of
+them upstairs,--so I am never lonely."
+
+Mr. Bentley did not appear to notice that her lips quivered.
+
+Hodder turned his eyes from her face. "Miss Marcy has been lonely," he
+explained, "and I thought we might get her a room near by, where she
+might see them often. She is going to do embroidery."
+
+"Why, Sally will know of a room," Mr. Bentley replied. "Sam!" he called.
+
+"Yessah--yes, Mistah Ho'ace." Sam appeared at the door.
+
+"Ask Miss Sally to come down, if she's not busy."
+
+Kate Marcy sat dumbly in her chair, her hands convulsively clasping its
+arms, her breast heaving stormily, her face becoming intense with
+the effort of repressing the wild emotion within her: emotion that
+threatened to strangle her if resisted, or to sweep her out like a tide
+and drown her in deep waters: emotion that had no one mewing, and yet
+summed up a life, mysteriously and overwhelmingly aroused by the sight
+of a room, and of a kindly old gentleman who lived in it!
+
+Mr. Bentley took the chair beside her.
+
+"Why, I believe it's going to clear off, after all," he exclaimed. "Sam
+predicted it, before breakfast. He pretends to be able to tell by the
+flowers. After a while I must show you my flowers, Miss Marcy, and what
+Dalton Street can do by way of a garden--Mr. Hodder could hardly believe
+it, even when he saw it." Thus he went on, the tips of his fingers
+pressed together, his head bent forward in familiar attitude, his face
+lighted, speaking naturally of trivial things that seemed to suggest
+themselves; and careful, with exquisite tact that did not betray itself,
+to address both. A passing automobile startled her with the blast of its
+horn. "I'm afraid I shall never get accustomed to them," he lamented.
+"At first I used to be thankful there were no trolley cars on this
+street, but I believe the automobiles are worse."
+
+A figure flitted through the hall and into the room, which Hodder
+recognized as Miss Grower's. She reminded him of a flying shuttle across
+the warp of Mr. Bentley's threads, weaving them together; swift, sure,
+yet never hurried or flustered. One glance at the speechless woman
+seemed to suffice her for a knowledge of the situation.
+
+"Mr. Hodder has brought us a new friend and neighbour, Sally,--Miss Kate
+Marcy. She is to have a room near us, that we may see her often."
+
+Hodder watched Miss Grower's procedure with a breathless interest.
+
+"Why, Mrs. McQuillen has a room--across the street, you know, Mr.
+Bentley."
+
+Sally perched herself on the edge of the armchair and laid her hand
+lightly on Kate Marcy's.
+
+Even Sally Grover was powerless to prevent the inevitable, and the touch
+of her hand seemed the signal for the release of the pent-up forces. The
+worn body, the worn nerves, the weakened will gave way, and Kate Marcy
+burst into a paroxysm of weeping that gradually became automatic,
+convulsive, like a child's. There was no damming this torrent, once
+released. Kindness, disinterested friendship, was the one unbearable
+thing.
+
+"We must bring her upstairs," said Sally Grover, quietly, "she's going
+to pieces."
+
+Hodder helping, they fairly carried her up the flight, and laid her on
+Sally Grover's own bed.
+
+That afternoon she was taken to Mrs. McQuillen's.
+
+The fiends are not easily cheated. And during the nights and days that
+followed even Sally Grower, whose slight frame was tireless, whose
+stoicism was amazing, came out of the sick room with a white face and
+compressed lips. Tossing on the mattress, Kate Marcy enacted over again
+incident after incident of her past life, events natural to an existence
+which had been largely devoid of self-pity, but which now, clearly
+enough, tested the extreme limits of suffering. Once more, in her
+visions, she walked the streets, wearily measuring the dark, empty
+blocks, footsore, into the smaller hours of the night; slyly,
+insinuatingly, pathetically offering herself--all she possessed--to the
+hovering beasts of prey. And even these rejected her, with gibes, with
+obscene jests that sprang to her lips and brought a shudder to those who
+heard.
+
+Sometimes they beheld flare up fitfully that mysterious thing called
+the human spirit, which all this crushing process had not served to
+extinguish. She seemed to be defending her rights, whatever these may
+have been! She expostulated with policemen. And once, when Hodder was
+present, she brought back vividly to his mind that first night he had
+seen her, when she had defied him and sent him away. In moments she
+lived over again the careless, reckless days when money and good looks
+had not been lacking, when rich food and wines had been plentiful.
+And there were other events which Sally Grower and the good-natured
+Irishwoman, Mrs. McQuillen, not holding the key, could but dimly
+comprehend. Education, environment, inheritance, character--what a
+jumble of causes! What Judge was to unravel them, and assign the exact
+amount of responsibility?
+
+There were other terrible scenes when, more than semiconscious, she
+cried out piteously for drink, and cursed them for withholding it. And
+it was in the midst of one of these that an incident occurred which made
+a deep impression upon young Dr. Giddings, hesitating with his opiates,
+and assisting the indomitable Miss Grower to hold his patient. In the
+midst of the paroxysm Mr. Bentley entered and stood over her by the
+bedside, and suddenly her struggles ceased. At first she lay intensely
+still, staring at him with wide eyes of fear. He sat down and took her
+hand, and spoke to her, quietly and naturally, and her pupils relaxed.
+She fell into a sleep, still clinging to his fingers.
+
+It was Sally who opposed the doctor's wish to send her to a hospital.
+
+"If it's only a question of getting back her health, she'd better die,"
+she declared. "We've got but one chance with her, Dr. Giddings, to keep
+her here. When she finds out she's been to a hospital, that will be the
+end of it with her kind. We'll never get hold of her again. I'll take
+care of Mrs. McQuillen."
+
+Doctor Giddings was impressed by this wisdom.
+
+"You think you have a chance, Miss Grower?" he asked. He had had a
+hospital experience.
+
+Miss Grower was wont to express optimism in deeds rather than words.
+
+"If I didn't think so, I'd ask you to put a little more in your
+hypodermic next time," she replied.
+
+And the doctor went away, wondering....
+
+Drink! Convalescence brought little release for the watchers. The fiends
+would retire, pretending to have abandoned the field, only to swoop down
+again when least expected. There were periods of calm when it seemed as
+though a new and bewildered personality were emerging, amazed to find
+in life a kindly thing, gazing at the world as one new-born. And again,
+Mrs. McQuillen or Ella Finley might be seen running bareheaded across
+the street for Miss Grower. Physical force was needed, as the rector
+discovered on one occasion; physical force, and something more, a
+dauntlessness that kept Sally Grower in the room after the other women
+had fled in terror. Then remorse, despondency, another fear....
+
+As the weeks went by, the relapses certainly became fewer. Something was
+at work, as real in its effects as the sunlight, but invisible. Hodder
+felt it, and watched in suspense while it fought the beasts in this
+woman, rending her frame in anguish. The frame might succumb, the breath
+might leave it to moulder, but the struggle, he knew, would go until the
+beasts were conquered. Whence this knowledge?--for it was knowledge.
+
+On the quieter days of her convalescence she seemed, indeed, more
+Madonna than Magdalen as she sat against the pillows, her red-gold hair
+lying in two heavy plaits across her shoulders, her cheeks pale; the
+inner, consuming fires that smouldered in her eyes died down. At such
+times her newly awakened innocence (if it might be called such--pathetic
+innocence, in truth!) struck awe into Hodder; her wonder was matched
+by his own. Could there be another meaning in life than the pursuit of
+pleasure, than the weary effort to keep the body alive?
+
+Such was her query, unformulated. What animated these persons who had
+struggled over her so desperately, Sally Grower, Mr. Bentley, and Hodder
+himself? Thus her opening mind. For she had a mind.
+
+Mr. Bentley was the chief topic, and little by little he became exalted
+into a mystery of which she sought the explanation.
+
+"I never knew anybody like him," she would exclaim.
+
+"Why, I'd seen him on Dalton Street with the children following him, and
+I saw him again that day of the funeral. Some of the girls I knew used
+to laugh at him. We thought he was queer. And then, when you brought
+me to him that morning and he got up and treated me like a lady, I just
+couldn't stand it. I never felt so terrible in my life. I just wanted
+to die, right then and there. Something inside of me kept pressing
+and pressing, until I thought I would die. I knew what it was to hate
+myself, but I never hated myself as I have since then.
+
+"He never says anything about God, and you don't, but when he comes in
+here he seems like God to me. He's so peaceful,--he makes me peaceful.
+I remember the minister in Madison,--he was a putty-faced man with
+indigestion,--and when he prayed he used to close his eyes and try to
+look pious, but he never fooled me. He never made me believe he knew
+anything about God. And don't think for a minute he'd have done what you
+and Miss Grower and Mr. Bentley did! He used to cross the street to
+get out of the way of drunken men--he wouldn't have one of them in his
+church. And I know of a girl he drove out of town because she had a
+baby and her sweetheart wouldn't marry her. He sent her to hell. Hell's
+here--isn't it?"
+
+These sudden remarks of hers surprised and troubled him. But they had
+another effect, a constructive effect. He was astonished, in going over
+such conversations afterwards, to discover that her questions and
+his efforts to answer them in other than theological terms were both
+illuminating and stimulating. Sayings in the Gospels leaped out in his
+mind, fired with new meanings; so simple, once perceived, that he was
+amazed not to have seen them before. And then he was conscious of a
+palpitating joy which left in its wake a profound thankfulness. He made
+no attempt as yet to correlate these increments, these glimpses of truth
+into a system, but stored them preciously away.
+
+He taxed his heart and intellect to answer her sensible and helpfully,
+and thus found himself avoiding the logic, the Greek philosophy, the
+outworn and meaningless phrases of speculation; found himself employing
+(with extraordinary effect upon them both) the simple words from which
+many of these theories had been derived. "He that hath seen me hath seen
+the Father." What she saw in Horace Bentley, he explained, was God. God
+wished us to know how to live, in order that we might find happiness,
+and therefore Christ taught us that the way to find happiness was to
+teach others how to live,--once we found out. Such was the meaning of
+Christ's Incarnation, to teach us how to live in order that we
+might find God and happiness. And Hodder translated for her the word
+Incarnation.
+
+Now, he asked, how were we to recognize God, how might we know how he
+wished us to live, unless we saw him in human beings, in the souls into
+which he had entered? In Mr. Bentley's soul? Was this too deep?
+
+She pondered, with flushed face.
+
+"I never had it put to me like that," she said, presently. "I never
+could have known what you meant if I hadn't seen Mr. Bentley."
+
+Here was a return flash, for him. Thus, teaching he taught. From this
+germ he was to evolve for himself the sublime truth that the world
+grown better, not through automatic, soul-saving machinery, but by
+Personality.
+
+On another occasion she inquired about "original sin;"--a phrase which
+had stuck in her memory since the stormings of the Madison preacher.
+Here was a demand to try his mettle.
+
+"It means," he replied after a moment, "that we are all apt to follow
+the selfish, animal instincts of our matures, to get all we can for
+ourselves without thinking of others, to seek animal pleasures. And we
+always suffer for it."
+
+"Sure," she agreed. "That's what happened to me."
+
+"And unless we see and know some one like Mr. Bentley," he went on,
+choosing his words, "or discover for ourselves what Christ was, and what
+he tried to tell us, we go on 'suffering, because we don't see any way
+out. We suffer because we feel that we are useless, that other persons
+are doing our work."
+
+"That's what hell is!" She was very keen. "Hell's here," she repeated.
+
+"Hell may begin here, and so may heaven," he answered.
+
+"Why, he's in heaven now!" she exclaimed, "it's funny I never thought of
+it before." Of course she referred to Mr. Bentley.
+
+Thus; by no accountable process of reasoning, he stumbled into the path
+which was to lead him to one of the widest and brightest of his vistas,
+the secret of eternity hidden in the Parable of the Talents! But it will
+not do to anticipate this matter....
+
+The divine in this woman of the streets regenerated by the divine in her
+fellow-creatures, was gasping like a new-born babe for breath. And with
+what anxiety they watched her! She grew strong again, went with Sally
+Drover and the other girls on Sunday excursions to the country, applied
+herself to her embroidery with restless zeal for days, only to have it
+drop from her nerveless fingers. But her thoughts were uncontrollable,
+she was drawn continually to the edge of that precipice which hung over
+the waters whence they had dragged her, never knowing when the vertigo
+would seize her. And once Sally Drover, on the alert for just such an
+occurrence, pursued her down Dalton Street and forced her back...
+
+Justice to Miss Drover cannot be done in these pages. It was she who
+bore the brunt of the fierce resentment of the reincarnated fiends when
+the other women shrank back in fear, and said nothing to Mr. Bentley
+or Hodder until the incident was past. It was terrible indeed to behold
+this woman revert--almost in the twinkling of an eye--to a vicious
+wretch crazed for drink, to feel that the struggle had to be fought all
+over again. Unable to awe Sally Drover's spirit, she would grow piteous.
+
+"For God's sake let me go--I can't stand it. Let me go to hell--that's
+where I belong. What do you bother with me for? I've got a right."
+
+Once the doctor had to be called. He shook his head but his eye met Miss
+Grower's, and he said nothing.
+
+"I'll never be able to pull out, I haven't got the strength," she told
+Hodder, between sobs. "You ought to have left me be, that was where
+I belonged. I can't stand it, I tell you. If it wasn't for that woman
+watching me downstairs, and Sally Grower, I'd have had a drink before
+this. It ain't any use, I've got so I can't live without it--I don't
+want to live."
+
+And then remorse, self-reproach, despair,--almost as terrible to
+contemplate. She swore she would never see Mr. Bentley again, she
+couldn't face him.
+
+Yet they persisted, and gained ground. She did see Mr. Bentley, but what
+he said to her, or she to him, will never be known. She didn't speak of
+it....
+
+Little by little her interest was aroused, her pride in her work
+stimulated. None was more surprised than Hodder when Sally Grower
+informed him that the embroidery was really good; but it was thought
+best, for psychological reasons, to discard the old table-cover with its
+associations and begin a new one. On occasional evenings she brought
+her sewing over to Mr. Bentley's, while Sally read aloud to him and the
+young women in the library. Miss Grower's taste in fiction was romantic;
+her voice (save in the love passages, when she forgot herself )
+sing-song, but new and unsuspected realms were opened up for Kate Marcy,
+who would drop her work and gaze wide-eyed out of the window, into the
+darkness.
+
+And it was Sally who must be given credit for the great experiment,
+although she took Mr. Bentley and Hodder into her confidence. On it
+they staked all. The day came, at last, when the new table-cover was
+finished. Miss Grower took it to the Woman's Exchange, actually sold it,
+and brought back the money and handed it to her with a smile, and left
+her alone.
+
+An hour passed. At the end of it Kate Marcy came out of her room,
+crossed the street, and knocked at the door of Mr. Bentley's library.
+Hodder happened to be there.
+
+"Come in," Mr. Bentley said.
+
+She entered, breathless, pale. Her eyes, which had already lost much of
+the dissipated look, were alight with exaltation. Her face bore evidence
+of the severity of the hour of conflict, and she was perilously near to
+tears. She handed Mr. Bentley the money.
+
+"What's this, Kate?" he asked, in his kindly way.
+
+"It's what I earned, sir," she faltered. "Miss Grower sold the
+table-cover. I thought maybe you'd put it aside for me, like you do for
+the others.
+
+"I'll take good care of it," he said.
+
+"Oh, sir, I don't ever expect to repay you, and Miss Grower and Mr.
+Hodder!
+
+"Why, you are repaying us," he replied, cutting her short, "you are
+making us all very happy. And Sally tells me at the Exchange they like
+your work so well they are asking for more. I shouldn't have suspected,"
+he added, with a humorous glance at the rector, "that Mr. Hodder knew so
+much about embroidery."
+
+He rose, and put the money in his desk,--such was his genius for
+avoiding situations which threatened to become emotional.
+
+"I've started another one," she told them, as she departed.
+
+A few moments later Miss Grower appeared.
+
+"Sally," said Mr. Bentley, "you're a wise woman. I believe I've made
+that remark before. You have managed that case wonderfully."
+
+"There was a time," replied Miss Grower, thoughtfully, "when it looked
+pretty black. We've got a chance with her now, I think."
+
+"I hope so. I begin to feel so," Mr. Bentley declared.
+
+"If we succeed," Miss Grower went on, "it will be through the heart. And
+if we lose her again, it will be through the heart."
+
+Hodder started at this proof of insight.
+
+"You know her history, Mr. Hodder?" she asked.
+
+"Yes," he said.
+
+"Well, I don't. And I don't care to. But the way to get at Kate Marcy,
+light as she is in some respects, is through her feelings. And she's
+somehow kept 'em alive. We've got to trust her, from now on--that's the
+only way. And that's what God does, anyhow."
+
+This was one of Miss Grover's rare references to the Deity.
+
+Turning over that phrase in his mind, Hodder went slowly back towards
+the parish house. God trusted individuals--even such as Kate Marcy. What
+did that mean? Individual responsibility! He repeated it. Was the world
+on that principle, then? It was as though a search-light were flung
+ahead of him and he saw, dimly, a new order--a new order in government
+and religion. And, as though spoken by a voice out of the past, there
+sounded in his ears the text of that sermon which had so deeply moved
+him, "I will arise and go to my Father."
+
+The church was still open, and under the influence of the same strange
+excitement which had driven him to walk in the rain so long ago, he
+entered and went slowly up the marble aisle. Through the gathering gloom
+he saw the figure on the cross. And as he stood gazing at it, a message
+for which he had been waiting blazed up within him.
+
+He would not leave the Church!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII. THE RIDDLE OF CAUSATION
+
+
+I
+
+In order to portray this crisis in the life of Kate Marcy, the outcome
+of which is still uncertain, other matters have been ignored.
+
+How many persons besides John Hodder have seemed to read--in crucial
+periods--a meaning into incidents having all the outward appearance
+of accidents! What is it that leads us to a certain man or woman at a
+certain time, or to open a certain book? Order and design? or influence?
+
+The night when he had stumbled into the cafe in Dalton Street might well
+have been termed the nadir of Hodder's experience. His faith had been
+blotted out, and, with it had suddenly been extinguished all spiritual
+sense, The beast had taken possession. And then, when it was least
+expected,--nay, when despaired of, had come the glimmer of a
+light; distant, yet clear. He might have traced the course of his
+disillusionment, perhaps, but cause and effect were not discernible
+here.
+
+They soon became so, and in the weeks that followed he grew to have the
+odd sense of a guiding hand on his shoulder,--such was his instinctive
+interpretation of it, rather than the materialistic one of things
+ordained. He might turn, in obedience to what seemed a whim, either to
+the right or left, only to recognize new blazes that led him on with
+surer step; and trivial accidents became events charged with meaning. He
+lived in continual wonder.
+
+One broiling morning, for instance, he gathered up the last of the books
+whose contents he had a month before so feverishly absorbed, and which
+had purged him of all fallacies. At first he had welcomed them with a
+fierce relief, sucked them dry, then looked upon them with loathing. Now
+he pressed them gratefully, almost tenderly, as he made his way along
+the shady side of the street towards the great library set in its little
+park.
+
+He was reminded, as he passed from the blinding sunlight into the cool
+entrance hall, with its polished marble stairway and its statuary, that
+Eldon Parr's munificence had made the building possible: that some day
+Mr. Parr's bust would stand in that vestibule with that of Judge Henry
+Goodrich--Philip Goodrich's grandfather--and of other men who had served
+their city and their commonwealth.
+
+Upstairs, at the desk, he was handing in the volumes to the young woman
+whose duty it was to receive them when he was hailed by a brisk little
+man in an alpaca coat, with a skin like brown parchment.
+
+"Why, Mr. Hodder," he exclaimed cheerfully, with a trace of German
+accent, "I had an idea you were somewhere on the cool seas with our
+friend, Mr. Parr. He spoke, before he left, of inviting you."
+
+It had been Eldon Parr, indeed, who had first brought Hodder to
+the library, shortly after the rector's advent, and Mr. Engel had
+accompanied them on a tour of inspection; the financier himself had
+enjoined the librarian to "take good care" of the clergyman. Mr. Waring,
+Mr. Atterbury; and Mr. Constable were likewise trustees. And since then,
+when talking to him, Hodder had had a feeling that Mr. Engel was not
+unconscious of the aura--if it may be called such--of his vestry.
+
+Mr. Engel picked up one of the books as it lay on the counter, and as he
+read the title his face betrayed a slight surprise.
+
+"Modern criticism!" he exclaimed.
+
+"You have found me out," the rector acknowledged, smiling.
+
+"Came into my room, and have a chat," said the librarian, coaxingly.
+
+It was a large chamber at the corner of the building, shaded by awnings,
+against which brushed the branches of an elm which had belonged to the
+original park. In the centre of the room was a massive oak desk, one
+whole side of which was piled high with new volumes.
+
+"Look there," said the librarian, with a quick wave of his hand, "those
+are some which came in this week, and I had them put here to look
+over. Two-thirds of 'em on religion, or religious philosophy. Does that
+suggest anything to you clergymen?"
+
+"Do many persons read them, Mr. Engel?" said the rector, at length.
+
+"Read them!" cried Mr. Engel, quizzically. "We librarians are a sort of
+weather-vanes, if people only knew enough to consult us. We can hardly
+get a sufficient number of these new religious books the good ones, I
+mean--to supply the demand. And the Lord knows what trash is devoured,
+from what the booksellers tell me. It reminds me of the days when this
+library was down on Fifth Street, years ago, and we couldn't supply
+enough Darwins and Huxleys and Spencers and popular science generally.
+That was an agnostic age. But now you'd be surprised to see the
+different kinds of men and women who come demanding books on
+religion--all sorts and conditions. They're beginning to miss it out of
+their lives; they want to know. If my opinion's worth anything, I
+should not hesitate to declare that we're on the threshold of a greater
+religious era than the world has ever seen."
+
+Hodder thrust a book back into the pile, and turned abruptly, with a
+manner that surprised the librarian. No other clergyman to whom he had
+spoken on this subject had given evidence of this strong feeling,
+and the rector of St. John's was the last man from whom he would have
+expected it.
+
+"Do you really think so?" Hodder demanded.
+
+"Why, yes," said Mr. Engel, when he had recovered from his astonishment.
+"I'm sure of it. I think clergymen especially--if you will pardon
+me--are apt to forget that this is a reading age. That a great many
+people who used to get what instruction they had--ahem--from churches,
+for instance, now get it from books. I don't want to say anything to
+offend you, Mr. Hodder--"
+
+"You couldn't," interrupted the rector. He was equally surprised at the
+discovery that he had misjudged Mr. Engel, and was drawn towards him now
+with a strong sympathy and curiosity.
+
+"Well," replied Mr. Engel, "I'm glad to hear you say that." He
+restrained a gasp. Was this the orthodox Mr. Hodder of St. John's?
+
+"Why," said Hodder, sitting down, "I've learned, as you have, by
+experience. Only my experience hasn't been so hopeful as yours--that is,
+if you regard yours as hopeful. It would be hypocritical of me not to
+acknowledge that the churches are losing ground, and that those who
+ought to be connected with them are not. I am ready to admit that the
+churches are at fault. But what you tell me of people reading these
+books gives me more courage than I have had for--for some time."
+
+"Is it so!" ejaculated the little man, relapsing into the German idiom
+of his youth.
+
+"It is," answered the rector, with an emphasis not to be denied. "I wish
+you would give me your theory about this phenomenon, and speak frankly."
+
+"But I thought--" the bewildered librarian began. "I saw you had been
+reading those books, but I thought--"
+
+"Naturally you did," said Holder, smiling. His personality, his
+ascendency, his poise, suddenly felt by the other, were still more
+confusing. "You thought me a narrow, complacent, fashionable priest who
+had no concern as to what happened outside the walls of his church, who
+stuck obstinately to dogmas and would give nothing else a hearing. Well,
+you were right."
+
+"Ah, I didn't think all that," Mr. Engel protested, and his parchment
+skin actually performed the miracle of flushing. "I am not so stupid.
+And once, long ago when I was young, I was going to be a minister
+myself."
+
+"What prevented you?" asked Holder, interested.
+
+"You want me to be frank--yes, well, I couldn't take the vows." The
+brown eyes of the quiet, humorous, self-contained and dried-up custodian
+of the city's reading flamed up. "I felt the call," he exclaimed. "You
+may not credit it to look at me now, Mr. Hodder. They said to me, 'here
+is what you must swear to believe before you can make men and women
+happier and more hopeful, rescue them from sin and misery!' You know
+what it was."
+
+Hodder nodded.
+
+"It was a crime. It had nothing to do with religion. I thought it over
+for a year--I couldn't. Oh, I have since been thankful. I can see now
+what would have happened to me--I should have had fatty degeneration of
+the soul."
+
+The expression was not merely forcible, it was overwhelming. It brought
+up before Holder's mind, with sickening reality, the fate he had himself
+escaped. Fatty degeneration of the soul!
+
+The little man, seeing the expression on the rector's face, curbed his
+excitement, and feared he had gone too far.
+
+"You will pardon me!" he said penitently, "I forget myself. I did not
+mean all clergymen."
+
+"I have never heard it put so well," Holder declared. "That is exactly
+what occurs in many cases."
+
+"Yes, it is that," said Engel, still puzzled, but encouraged, eyeing the
+strong face of the other. "And they lament that the ministry hasn't
+more big men. Sometimes they get one with the doctrinal type of mind--a
+Newman--but how often? And even a Newman would be of little avail
+to-day. It is Eucken who says that the individual, once released from
+external authority, can never be turned back to it. And they have been
+released by the hundreds of thousands ever since Luther's time, are
+being freed by the hundreds of thousands to-day. Democracy, learning,
+science, are releasing them, and no man, no matter how great he may be,
+can stem that tide. The able men in the churches now--like your Phillips
+Brooks, who died too soon--are beginning to see this. They are those who
+developed after the vows of the theological schools were behind them.
+Remove those vows, and you will see the young men come. Young men are
+idealists, Mr. Hodder, and they embrace other professions where the mind
+is free, and which are not one whit better paid than the ministry.
+
+"And what is the result," he cried, "of the senseless insistence on the
+letter instead of the spirit of the poetry of religion? Matthew Arnold
+was a thousand times right when he inferred that Jesus Christ never
+spoke literally and yet he is still being taken literally by most
+churches, and all the literal sayings which were put into his mouth
+are maintained as Gospel truth! What is the result of proclaiming
+Christianity in terms of an ancient science and theology which awaken
+no quickening response in the minds and hearts of to-day? That!" The
+librarian thrust a yellow hand towards the pile of books. "The new wine
+has burst the old skin and is running all over the world. Ah, my friend,
+if you could only see, as I do, the yearning for a satisfying religion
+which exists in this big city! It is like a vacuum, and those books
+are rushing to supply it. I little thought," he added dreamily, "when
+I renounced the ministry in so much sorrow that one day I should have
+a church of my own. This library is my church, and men and women of all
+creeds come here by the thousands. But you must pardon me. I have been
+carried away--I forgot myself."
+
+"Mr. Engel," replied the rector, "I want you to regard me as one of your
+parishioners."
+
+The librarian looked at him mutely, and the practical, desiccated little
+person seemed startlingly transformed into a mediaeval, German mystic.
+
+"You are a great man, Mr. Hodder," he said. "I might have guessed it."
+
+It was one of the moments when protest would have been trite,
+superfluous. And Hodder, in truth, felt something great swelling within
+him, something that was not himself, and yet strangely was. But just
+what--in view of his past strict orthodoxy and limited congregation--Mr.
+Engel meant, he could not have said. Had the librarian recognized,
+without confession on his part, the change in him? divined his future
+intentions?
+
+"It is curious that I should have met you this morning, Mr. Engel," he
+said. "I expressed surprise when you declared this was a religious age,
+because you corroborated something I had felt, but of which I had no
+sufficient proof. I felt that a great body of unsatisfied men and women
+existed, but that I was powerless to get in touch with them; I had
+discovered that truth, as you have so ably pointed out, is disguised and
+distorted by ancient dogmas; and that the old Authority, as you say, no
+longer carries weight."
+
+"Have you found the new one?" Mr. Engel demanded.
+
+"I think I have," the rector answered calmly, "it lies in personality. I
+do not know whether you will agree with me that the Church at large has
+a future, and I will confess to you that there was a time when I thought
+she had not. I see now that she has, once given to her ministers that
+freedom to develop of which you speak. In spite of the fact that truth
+has gradually been revealed to the world by what may be called an
+Apostolic Succession of Personalities,--Augustine, Dante, Francis of
+Assisi, Luther, Shakespeare, Milton, and our own Lincoln and Phillips
+Brooks,--to mention only a few,--the Church as a whole has been blind to
+it. She has insisted upon putting the individual in a straitjacket, she
+has never recognized that growth is the secret of life, that the clothes
+of one man are binding on another."
+
+"Ah, you are right--a thousand times right," cried the librarian.
+"You have read Royce, perhaps, when he says, 'This mortal shall put on
+individuality--'"
+
+"No," said the rector, outwardly cool, but inwardly excited by the
+coruscation of this magnificent paraphrase of Paul's sentence, by the
+extraordinary turn the conversation had taken. "I am ashamed to own that
+I have not followed the development of modern philosophy. The books
+I have just returned, on historical criticism," he went on, after a
+moment's hesitation, "infer what my attitude has been toward modern
+thought. We were made acquainted with historical criticism in the
+theological seminary, but we were also taught to discount it. I have
+discounted it, refrained from reading it,--until now. And yet I have
+heard it discussed in conferences, glanced over articles in the reviews.
+I had, you see, closed the door of my mind. I was in a state where
+arguments make no impression."
+
+The librarian made a gesture of sympathetic assent, which was also a
+tribute to the clergyman's frankness.
+
+"You will perhaps wonder how I could have lived these years in an
+atmosphere of modern thought and have remained uninfluenced. Well, I
+have recently been wondering--myself." Hodder smiled. "The name of Royce
+is by no means unfamiliar to me, and he taught at Harvard when I was
+an undergraduate. But the prevailing philosophy of that day among the
+students was naturalism. I represent a revolt from it. At the seminary I
+imbibed a certain amount of religious philosophy--but I did not continue
+it, as thousands of my more liberal fellow-clergymen have done. My
+religion 'worked' during the time, at least, I remained in my first
+parish. I had no interest in reconciling, for instance, the doctrine of
+evolution with the argument for design. Since I have been here in this
+city," he added, simply, "my days have been filled with a continued
+perplexity--when I was not too busy to think. Yes, there was an
+unacknowledged element of fear in my attitude, though I comforted myself
+with the notion that opinions, philosophical and scientific, were in a
+state of flux."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Mr. Engel, "I comprehend. But, from the manner in which
+you spoke just now, I should have inferred that you have been reading
+modern philosophy--that of the last twenty years. Ah, you have
+something before you, Mr. Hodder. You will thank God, with me, for that
+philosophy. It has turned the tide, set the current running the other
+way. Philosophy is no longer against religion, it is with it. And if
+you were to ask me to name one of the greatest religious teachers of
+our age, I should answer, William James. And there is Royce, of whom I
+spoke,--one of our biggest men. The dominant philosophies of our times
+have grown up since Arnold wrote his 'Literature and Dogma,' and they
+are in harmony with the quickening social spirit of the age, which is a
+religious spirit--a Christian spirit, I call it. Christianity is coming
+to its own. These philosophies, which are not so far apart, are the
+flower of the thought of the centuries, of modern science, of that most
+extraordinary of discoveries, modern psychology. And they are far from
+excluding religion, from denying the essential of Christ's teachings.
+On the other hand, they grant that the motive-power of the world is
+spiritual.
+
+"And this," continued Mr. Engel, "brings me to another aspect of
+authority. I wonder if it has struck you? In mediaeval times, when a
+bishop spoke ex cathedra, his authority, so far as it carried weight,
+came from two sources. First, the supposed divine charter of the Church
+to save and damn. That authority is being rapidly swept away. Second, he
+spoke with all the weight of the then accepted science and philosophy.
+But as soon as the new science began to lay hold on people's minds,
+as--for instance--when Galileo discovered that the earth moved instead
+of the sun (and the pope made him take it back), that second authority
+began to crumble too. In the nineteenth century science had grown so
+strong that the situation looked hopeless. Religion had apparently
+irrevocably lost that warrant also, and thinking men not spiritually
+inclined, since they had to make a choice between science and religion,
+took science as being the more honest, the more certain.
+
+"And now what has happened? The new philosophies have restored your
+second Authority, and your first, as you properly say, is replaced
+by the conception of Personality. Personality is nothing but the
+rehabilitation of the prophet, the seer. Get him, as Hatch says, back
+into your Church. The priests with their sacrifices and automatic rites,
+the logicians, have crowded him out. Why do we read the Old Testament at
+all? Not for the laws of the Levites, not for the battles and hangings,
+but for the inspiration of the prophets. The authority of the prophet
+comes through personality, the source of which is in what Myers calls
+the infinite spiritual world--in God. It was Christ's own authority.
+
+"And as for your other authority, your ordinary man, when he reads
+modern philosophy, says to himself, this does not conflict with science?
+But he gets no hint, when he goes to most churches, that there is,
+between the two, no real quarrel, and he turns away in despair. He may
+accept the pragmatism of James, the idealism of Royce, or even what is
+called neo realism. In any case, he gains the conviction that a force
+for good is at worn in the world, and he has the incentive to become
+part of it..... But I have given you a sermon!"
+
+"For which I can never be sufficiently, grateful," said Hodder, with an
+earnestness not to be mistaken.
+
+The little man's eyes rested admiringly, and not without emotion, on the
+salient features of the tall clergyman. And when he spoke again, it was
+in acknowledgment of the fact that he had read Hodder's purpose.
+
+"You will have opposition, my friend. They will fight you--some persons
+we know. They do not wish--what you and I desire. But you will not
+surrender--I knew it." Mr. Engel broke off abruptly, and rang a bell on
+his desk. "I will make out for you a list. I hope you may come in again,
+often. We shall have other talks,--yes? I am always here."
+
+Then it came to pass that Hodder carried back with him another armful of
+books. Those he had brought back were the Levellers of the False. These
+were the Builders of the True.
+
+
+
+II
+
+Hodder had known for many years that the writings of Josiah Royce and of
+William James had "been in the air," so to speak, and he had heard them
+mentioned at dinner parties by his more intellectual parishioners, such
+as Mrs. Constable and Martha Preston. Now he was able to smile at his
+former attitude toward these moderns, whose perusal he had deprecated as
+treason to the saints! And he remembered his horror on having listened
+to a fellow-clergyman discuss with calmness the plan of the "Varieties
+of Religious Experiences." A sacrilegious dissection of the lives
+of these very saints! The scientific process, the theories of modern
+psychology applied with sang-froid to the workings of God in the human
+soul! Science he had regarded as the proclaimed enemy of religion, and
+in these days of the apotheosis of science not even sacred things were
+spared.
+
+Now Hodder saw what the little librarian had meant by an authority
+restored. The impartial method of modern science had become so firmly
+established in the mind of mankind by education and reading that the
+ancient unscientific science of the Roman Empire, in which orthodox
+Christianity was clothed, no longer carried authority. In so far as
+modern science had discovered truth, religion had no quarrel with it.
+And if theology pretended to be the science of religion, surely it
+must submit to the test of the new science! The dogged clinging to the
+archaic speculations of apologists, saints, and schoolmen had brought
+religion to a low ebb indeed.
+
+One of the most inspiring books he read was by an English clergyman of
+his own Church whom he had formerly looked upon as a heretic, with all
+that the word had once implied. It was a frank yet reverent study of the
+self-consciousness of Christ, submitting the life and teachings of
+Jesus to modern criticism and the scientific method. And the Saviour's
+divinity, rather than being lessened, was augmented. Hodder found it
+infinitely refreshing that the so-called articles of Christian belief,
+instead of being put first and their acceptance insisted upon, were made
+the climax of the investigation.
+
+Religion, he began to perceive, was an undertaking, are attempt to
+find unity and harmony of the soul by adopting, after mature thought,
+a definite principle in life. If harmony resulted,--if the principle
+worked, it was true. Hodder kept an open mind, but he became a
+pragmatist so far. Science, on the other hand, was in a sphere by
+herself, and need have no conflict with religion; science was not an
+undertaking, but an impartial investigation by close observation of
+facts in nature. Her object was to discover truths by these methods
+alone. She had her theories, indeed, but they must be submitted to
+rigorous tests. This from a book by Professor Perry, an advocate of the
+new realism.
+
+On the other hand there were signs that modern science, by infinitesimal
+degrees, might be aiding in the solution of the Mystery....
+
+But religion, Hodder saw, was trusting. Not credulous, silly trusting,
+but thoughtful trusting, accepting such facts as were definitely known.
+Faith was trusting. And faith without works was dead simply because
+there could be no faith without works. There was no such thing as belief
+that did not result in act.
+
+A paragraph which made a profound impression on Hodder at that time
+occurs in James's essay, "Is life worth living?"
+
+"Now-what do I mean by I trusting? Is the word to carry with it
+license to define in detail an invisible world, and to authorize and
+excommunicate those whose trust is different?... Our faculties of belief
+were not given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal; they were
+given us to live by. And to trust our religions demands men first of all
+to live in the light of them, and to act as if the invisible world which
+they suggest were real. It is a fact of human nature that man can live
+and die by the help of a sort of faith that goes without a single dogma
+and definition."
+
+Yet it was not these religious philosophies which had saved him, though
+the stimulus of their current had started his mind revolving like a
+motor. Their function, he perceived now, was precisely to compel him
+to see what had saved him, to reenforce it with the intellect, with
+the reason, and enable him to save others. The current set up,--by a
+thousand suggestions of which he made notes,--a personal construction,
+coordination, and he had the exhilaration of feeling, within him, a
+creative process all his own. Behold a mystery 'a paradox'--one of many.
+As his strength grew greater day by day, as his vision grew clearer, he
+must exclaim with Paul: "Yet not I, but the grace of God which was with
+me!"
+
+He, Hodder, was but an instrument transmitting power. And yet--oh
+paradox!--the instrument continued to improve, to grow stronger, to
+develop individuality and personality day by day! Life, present and
+hereafter, was growth, development, the opportunity for service in a
+cause. To cease growing was to die.
+
+He perceived at last the form all religion takes is that of consecration
+to a Cause,--one of God's many causes. The meaning of life is to find
+one's Cause, to lose one's self in it. His was the liberation of the
+Word,--now vouchsafed to him; the freeing of the spark from under the
+ashes. The phrase was Alison's. To help liberate the Church, fan into
+flame the fire which was to consume the injustice, the tyranny, the
+selfishness of the world, until the Garvins, the Kate Marcys, the
+stunted children, and anaemic women were no longer possible.
+
+It was Royce who, in one illuminating sentence, solved for him the
+puzzle, pointed out whence his salvation had come. "For your cause can
+only be revealed to you through some presence that first teaches you
+to love the unity of the spiritual life... You must find it in human
+shape."
+
+Horace Bentley!
+
+He, Hodder, had known this, but known it vaguely, without sanction. The
+light had shone for him even in the darkness of that night in Dalton
+Street, when he thought to have lost it forever. And he had awakened
+the next morning, safe,--safe yet bewildered, like a half drowned man on
+warm sands in the sun.
+
+"The will of the spiritual world, the divine will, revealed in man."
+What sublime thoughts, as old as the Cross itself, yet continually and
+eternally new!
+
+
+
+III
+
+There was still another whose face was constantly before him, and the
+reflection of her distressed yet undaunted soul,--Alison Parr. The
+contemplation of her courage, of her determination to abide by nothing
+save the truth, had had a power over him that he might not estimate, and
+he loved her as a man loves a woman, for her imperfections. And he loved
+her body and her mind.
+
+One morning, as he walked back from Mrs. Bledsoe's through an
+unfrequented, wooded path of the Park, he beheld her as he had summoned
+her in his visions. She was sitting motionless, gazing before her with
+clear eyes, as at the Fates...
+
+She started on suddenly perceiving him, but it was characteristic of her
+greeting that she seemed to feel no surprise at the accident which had
+brought them together.
+
+"I am afraid," he said, smiling, "that I have broken in on some profound
+reflections."
+
+She did not answer at once, but looked up at him, as he stood over her,
+with one of her strange, baffling gazes, in which there was the hint of
+a welcoming smile.
+
+"Reflection seems to be a circular process with me," she answered. "I
+never get anywhere--like you."
+
+"Like me!" he exclaimed, seating himself on the bench. Apparently their
+intercourse, so long as it should continue, was destined to be on the
+basis of intimacy in which it had begun. It was possible at once to be
+aware of her disturbing presence, and yet to feel at home in it.
+
+"Like you, yes," she said, continuing to examine him. "You've changed
+remarkably."
+
+In his agitation, at this discovery of hers he again repeated her words.
+
+"Why, you seem happier, you look happier. It isn't only that, I can't
+explain how you impress me. It struck me when you were talking to Mr.
+Bentley the other day. You seem to see something you didn't see when
+I first met you, that you didn't see the first time we were at Mr.
+Bentley's together. Your attitude is fixed--directed. You have made a
+decision of some sort--a momentous one, I rather think."
+
+"Yes," he replied, "you are right. It's more than remarkable that you
+should have guessed it."
+
+She remained silent
+
+"I have decided," he found himself saying abruptly, "to continue in the
+Church."
+
+Still she was silent, until he wondered whether she would answer him. He
+had often speculated to himself how she would take this decision, but
+he could make no surmise from her expression as she stared off into the
+wood. Presently she turned her head, slowly, and looked into his face.
+Still she did not speak.
+
+"You are wondering how I can do it," he said.
+
+"Yes," she acknowledged, in a low voice.
+
+"I should like you to know--that is why I spoke of it. You have never
+asked me, and I have never told you that the convictions I formerly
+held I lost. And with them, for a while, went everything. At least so I
+believed."
+
+"I knew it," she answered, "I could see that, too."
+
+"When I argued with you, that afternoon,--the last time we talked
+together alone,--I was trying to convince myself, and you--" he
+hesitated, "--that there was something. The fact that you could not seem
+to feel it stimulated me."
+
+He read in her eyes that she understood him. And he dared not, nor did
+he need to emphasize further his own intense desire that she should find
+a solution of her own.
+
+"I wish you to know what I am telling you for two reasons," he went on.
+"It was you who spoke the words that led to the opening of my eyes
+to the situation into which I had been drifting for two years, who
+compelled me to look upon the inconsistencies and falsities which had
+gradually been borne in upon me. It was you, I think, who gave me the
+courage to face this situation squarely, since you possess that kind of
+courage yourself."
+
+"Oh, no," she cried. "You would have done it anyway."
+
+He paused a moment, to get himself in hand.
+
+"For this reason, I owed it to you to speak--to thank you. I have
+realized, since that first meeting, that you became my friend then, and
+that you spoke as a friend. If you had not believed in my sincerity,
+you would not have spoken. I wish you to know that I am fully aware and
+grateful for the honour you did me, and that I realize it is not always
+easy for you to speak so--to any one."
+
+She did not reply.
+
+"There is another reason for my telling you now of this decision of
+mine to remain a clergyman," he continued. "It is because I value your
+respect and friendship, and I hope you will believe that I would not
+take this course unless I saw my way clear to do it with sincerity."
+
+"One has only to look at you to see that you are sincere," she said
+gently, with a thrill in her voice that almost unmanned him. "I told
+you once that I should never have forgiven myself if I had wrecked your
+life. I meant it. I am very glad."
+
+It was his turn to be silent.
+
+"Just because I cannot see how it would be possible to remain in the
+Church after one had been--emancipated, so to speak,"--she smiled at
+him,--"is no reason why you may not have solved the problem."
+
+Such was the superfine quality of her honesty. Yet she trusted him! He
+was made giddy by a desire, which he fought down, to justify himself
+before her. His eye beheld her now as the goddess with the scales in
+her hand, weighing and accepting with outward calm the verdict of the
+balance .... Outward calm, but inner fire.
+
+"It makes no difference," she pursued evenly, bent on choosing her
+words, "that I cannot personally understand your emancipation, that mine
+is different. I can only see the preponderance of evil, of deception,
+of injustice--it is that which shuts out everything else. And it's
+temperamental, I suppose. By looking at you, as I told you, I can see
+that your emancipation is positive, while mine remains negative. You
+have somehow regained a conviction that the good is predominant, that
+there is some purpose in the universe."
+
+He assented. Once more she relapsed into thought, while he sat
+contemplating her profile. She turned to him again with a tremulous
+smile.
+
+"But isn't a conviction that the good is predominant, that there is a
+purpose in the universe, a long way from the positive assertions in
+the Creeds?" she asked. "I remember, when I went through what you would
+probably call disintegration, and which seemed to me enlightenment, that
+the Creeds were my first stumbling-blocks. It seemed wrong to repeat
+them."
+
+"I am glad you spoke of this," he replied gravely. "I have arrived at
+many answers to that difficulty--which did not give me the trouble I had
+anticipated. In the first place, I am convinced that it was much more of
+a difficulty ten, twenty, thirty years ago than it is to-day. That which
+I formerly thought was a radical tendency towards atrophy, the drift of
+the liberal party in my own Church and others, as well as that which
+I looked upon with some abhorrence as the free-thinking speculation
+of many modern writers, I have now come to see is reconstruction.
+The results of this teaching of religion in modern terms are already
+becoming apparent, and some persons are already beginning to see that
+the Creeds express certain elemental truths in frankly archaic
+language. All this should be explained in the churches and the Sunday
+schools,--is, in fact, being explained in some, and also in books for
+popular reading by clergymen of my own Church, both here and in England.
+We have got past the critical age."
+
+She followed him closely, but did not interrupt.
+
+"I do not mean to say that the Creeds are not the sources of much
+misunderstanding, but in my opinion they do not constitute a sufficient
+excuse for any clergyman to abandon his Church on account of them.
+Indeed there are many who interpret them by modern thought--which is
+closer to the teachings of Christ than ancient thought--whose honesty
+cannot be questioned. Personally, I think that the Creeds either ought
+to be taken out of the service; or changed, or else there should be
+a note inserted in the service and catechism definitely permitting
+a liberal interpretation which is exactly what so many clergymen,
+candidly, do now.
+
+"When I was ordained a deacon, and then a priest, I took vows which
+would appear to be literally conflicting. Compelled to choose between
+these vows, I accept that as supreme which I made when I affirmed that
+I would teach nothing which I should be persuaded might not be concluded
+and affirmed by the Scripture. The Creeds were derived from the
+Scripture--not the Scripture from the Creeds. As an individual among a
+body of Christians I am powerless to change either the ordinal vows or
+the Creeds, I am obliged to wait for the consensus of opinion. But if,
+on the whole, I can satisfy my conscience in repeating the Creeds and
+reading the service, as other honest men are doing--if I am convinced
+that I have an obvious work to do in that Church, it would be cowardly
+for me to abandon that work."
+
+Her eyes lighted up.
+
+"I see what you mean," she said, "by staying in you can do many things
+that you could not do, you can help to bring about the change, by being
+frank. That is your point of view. You believe in the future of the
+Church."
+
+"I believe in an universal, Christian organization," he replied.
+
+"But while stronger men are honest," she objected, "are not your ancient
+vows and ancient Creeds continually making weaker men casuists?"
+
+"Undoubtedly," he agreed vigorously, and thought involuntarily of Mr.
+Engel's phrased fatty degeneration of the soul. "Yet I can see the
+signs, on all sides, of a gradual emancipation, of which I might be
+deemed an example." A smile came into his eyes, like the sun on a
+grey-green sea.
+
+"Oh, you could never be a casuist!" she exclaimed, with a touch of
+vehemence. "You are much too positive. It is just that note, which is
+characteristic of so many clergymen, that note of smoothing-over and
+apology, which you lack. I could never feel it, even when you were
+orthodox. And now--" words failed her as she inspected his ruggedness.
+
+"And now," he took her up, to cover his emotion, "now I am not to be
+classified!"
+
+Still examining him, she reflected on this.
+
+"Classified? Isn't it because you're so much of an individual that one
+fails to classify you? You represent something new to my experience,
+something which seems almost a contradiction--an emancipated Church."
+
+"You imagined me out of the Church,--but where?" he demanded.
+
+"That's just it," she wondered intimately, "where? When I try, I can see
+no other place for you. Your place as in the pulpit."
+
+He uttered a sharp exclamation, which she did not heed.
+
+"I can't imagine you doing institutional work, as it is called,--you're
+not fitted for it, you'd be wasted in it. You gain by the historic
+setting of the Church, and yet it does not absorb you. Free to preach
+your convictions, unfettered, you will have a power over people that
+will be tremendous. You have a very strong personality."
+
+She set his heart, his mind, to leaping by this unexpected confirmation
+on her part of his hopes, and yet the man in him was intent upon the
+woman. She had now the air of detached judgment, while he could not
+refrain from speculating anxiously on the effect of his future course on
+her and on their intimate relationship. He forbore from thinking, now,
+of the looming events which might thrust them apart,--put a physical
+distance between them,--his anxiety was concerned with the possible
+snapping of the thread of sympathy which had bound them. In this
+respect, he dreaded her own future as much as his own. What might she
+do? For he felt, in her, a potential element of desperation; a capacity
+to commit, at any moment, an irretrievable act.
+
+"Once you have made your ideas your own," she mused, "you will have the
+power of convincing people."
+
+"And yet--"
+
+"And yet"--she seized his unfinished sentence, "you are not at all
+positive of convincing me. I'll give you the credit of forbearing to
+make proselytes." She smiled at him.
+
+Thus she read him again.
+
+"If you call making proselytes a desire to communicate a view of life
+which gives satisfaction--" he began, in his serious way.
+
+"Oh, I want to be convinced!" she exclaimed, penitently, "I'd give
+anything to feel as you feel. There's something lacking in me, there
+must be, and I have only seen the disillusionizing side. You infer that
+the issue of the Creeds will crumble,--preach the new, and the old will
+fall away of itself. But what is the new? How, practically, do you deal
+with the Creeds? We have got off that subject."
+
+"You wish to know?" he asked.
+
+"Yes--I wish to know."
+
+"The test of any doctrine is whether it can be translated into life,
+whether it will make any difference to the individual who accepts it.
+The doctrines expressed in the Creeds must stand or fall by the test.
+Consider, for instance, the fundamental doctrine in the Creeds, that of
+the Trinity, which has been much scoffed at. A belief in God, you will
+admit, has an influence on conduct, and the Trinity defines the three
+chief aspects of the God in whom Christians believe. Of what use to
+quarrel with the word Person if God be conscious? And the character
+of God has an influence on conduct. The ancients deemed him wrathful,
+jealous, arbitrary, and hence flung themselves before him and
+propitiated him. If the conscious God of the universe be good, he
+is spoken of as a Father. He is as once, in this belief, Father and
+Creator. And inasmuch as it is known that the divine qualities enter
+into man, and that one Man, Jesus, whose composite portrait--it is
+agreed--could not have been factitiously invented, was filled with them,
+we speak of God in man as the Son. And the Spirit of God that enters
+into the soul of man, transforming, inspiring, and driving him, is the
+Third Person, so-called. There is no difficulty so far, granted the
+initial belief in a beneficent God.
+
+"If we agree that life has a meaning, and, in order to conform to the
+purpose of the Spirit of the Universe, must be lived in one way, we
+certainly cannot object to calling that right way of living, that decree
+of the Spirit, the Word.
+
+"The Incarnate Word, therefore, is the concrete example of a human being
+completely filled with the Spirit, who lives a perfect life according to
+its decree. Ancient Greek philosophy called this decree, this meaning of
+life, the Logos, and the Nicene Creed is a confession of faith in that
+philosophy. Although this creed is said to have been, scandalously
+forced through the council of Nicaea by an emperor who had murdered his
+wife and children, and who himself was unbaptized, against a majority
+of bishops who would, if they had dared Constantine's displeasure, have
+given the conscience freer play, to-day the difficulty has, practically
+disappeared. The creed is there in the prayer book, and so long as it
+remains we are at liberty to interpret the ancient philosophy in which
+it is written--and which in any event could not have been greatly
+improved upon at that time--in our own modern way, as I am trying to
+explain it to you.
+
+"Christ was identified with the Logos, or Word, which must have had a
+meaning for all time, before and after its complete revelation.
+And this is what the Nicene Creed is trying to express when it says,
+'Begotten of his Father before all worlds.' In other words, the purpose
+which Christ revealed always existed. The awkward expression of
+the ancients, declaring that he 'came down' for our salvation
+(enlightenment) contains a fact we may prove by experience, if we accept
+the meaning he put upon existence, and adopt this meaning as our scheme
+of life. But we: must first be quite clear, as: to this meaning. We
+may and do express all this differently, but it has a direct bearing
+on life. It is the doctrine of the Incarnation. We begins to perceive
+through it that our own incarnations mean something, and that our task
+is to discover what they do mean--what part in the world purpose we are
+designed to play here.
+
+"Incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary is an emphasis on the
+fact that man born of woman may be divine. But the ignorant masses of
+the people of the Roman Empire were undoubtedly incapable of grasping a
+theory of the Incarnation put forward in the terms of Greek philosophy;
+while it was easy for them, with their readiness to believe in nature
+miracles, to accept the explanation of Christ's unique divinity as due
+to actual, physical generation by the Spirit. And the wide belief in the
+Empire in gods born in this way aided such a conception. Many thousands
+were converted to Christianity when a place was found in that religion
+for a feminine goddess, and these abandoned the worship of Isis,
+Demeter, and Diana for that of the Virgin Mary. Thus began an evolution
+which is still going on, and we see now that it was impossible that the
+world should understand at once the spiritual meaning of life as
+Christ taught it--that material facts merely symbolize the divine.
+For instance, the Gospel of John has been called the philosophical or
+spiritual gospel. And in spite of the fact that it has been assailed
+and historically discredited by modern critics, for me it serves to
+illuminate certain truths of Christ's message and teaching that the
+other Gospels do not. Mark, the earliest Gospel, does not refer to the
+miraculous birth. At the commencements of Matthew and Luke you will read
+of it, and it is to be noted that the rest of these narratives curiously
+and naively contradict it. Now why do we find the miraculous birth in
+these Gospels if it had not been inserted in order to prove, in a
+manner acceptable to simple and unlettered minds, the Theory of the
+Incarnation, Christ's preexistence? I do not say the insertion was
+deliberate. And it is difficult for us moderns to realize the polemic
+spirit in which the Gospels were written. They were clearly not written
+as history. The concern of the authors, I think, was to convert their
+readers to Christ.
+
+"When we turn to John, what do we find? In the opening verses of this
+Gospel the Incarnation is explained, not by a virgin birth, but in a
+manner acceptable to the educated and spiritually-minded, in terms of
+the philosophy of the day. And yet how simply! 'In the beginning was the
+Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.' I prefer John's
+explanation.
+
+"It is historically true that, in the earlier days when the Apostles'
+Creed was put forth, the phrase 'born of they Virgin Mary' was inserted
+for the distinct purpose of laying stress on the humanity of Christ, and
+to controvert the assertion of the Gnostic sect that he was not born at
+all, but appeared in the world in some miraculous way.
+
+"Thus to-day, by the aid of historical research, we are enabled to
+regard the Creeds in the light of their usefulness to life. The myth of
+the virgin birth probably arose through the zeal of some of the writers
+of the Gospels to prove that the prophecy of Isaiah predicted the advent
+of the Jewish Messiah who should be born of a virgin. Modern scholars
+are agreed that the word Olmah which Isaiah uses does not mean virgin,
+but young woman. There is quite a different Hebrew word for 'virgin.'
+The Jews, at the time the Gospels were written, and before, had
+forgotten their ancient Hebrew. Knowing this mistake, and how it arose,
+we may repeat the word Virgin Mary in the sense used by many early
+Christians, as designating the young woman who was the mother of Christ.
+
+"I might mention one or two other phrases, archaic and obscure. 'The
+Resurrection of the Body' may refer to the phenomenon of Christ's
+reappearance after death, for which modern psychology may or may not
+account. A little reflection, however, convinces one that the phenomenon
+did take place in some manner, or else, I think, we should never have
+heard of Christ. You will remember that the Apostles fled after his
+death on the cross, believing what he had told them was all only a
+dream. They were human, literal and cowardly, and they still needed some
+kind of inner, energizing conviction that the individuality persisted
+after death, that the solution of human life was victory over it, in
+order to gain the courage to go out and preach the Gospel and face death
+themselves. And it was Paul who was chiefly instrumental in freeing the
+message from the narrow bounds of Palestine and sending it ringing down
+the ages to us. The miracle doesn't lie in what Paul saw, but in the
+whole man transformed, made incandescent, journeying tirelessly to
+the end of his days up and down the length and breadth of the empire,
+labouring, as he says, more abundantly than they all. It is idle to say
+that the thing which can transform a man's entire nature and life is not
+a reality."
+
+She had listened, motionless, as under the spell of his words.
+Self-justification, as he proceeded, might easily have fused itself into
+a desire to convince her of the truth of his beliefs. But he was not
+deceived, he knew her well enough to understand, to feel the indomitable
+spirit of resistance in her. Swayed she could be, but she would mot
+easily surrender.
+
+"There is another phrase," she said after a moment, "which I have never
+heard explained, 'descended into hell.'"
+
+"It was merely a matter of controverting those who declared Christ was
+taken from the cross before he died. In the childish science of the
+time, to say that one descended into hell was to affirm that he was
+actually dead, since the souls of the departed were supposed to go at
+once to hell. Hell and heaven were definite places. To say that Christ
+ascended to heaven and sat on the right hand of the Father is to declare
+one's faith that his responsible work in the spiritual realm continues."
+
+"And the Atonement? doesn't that imply a sacrifice of propitiation?"
+
+"Atonement may be pronounced At-one-ment," Hodder replied. "The old
+idea, illustrated by a reference to the sacrifice of the ancients, fails
+to convey the truth to modern minds. And moreover, as I have inferred,
+these matters had to be conveyed in symbols until mankind were prepared
+to grasp the underlying spiritual truths which Christ sought to convey.
+Orthodox Christianity has been so profoundly affected by the ancient
+Jewish religion that the conception of God as wrathful and jealous--a
+God wholly outside--has persisted to our times. The Atonement means
+union with the Spirit of the Universe through vicarious suffering, and
+experience teaches us that our own sufferings are of no account unless
+they be for a cause, for the furtherance of the design of the beneficent
+Spirit which is continually at work. Christ may be said to have died for
+humanity because he had to suffer death itself in order to reveal
+the complete meaning of life. You once spoke to me about the sense of
+sin--of being unable to feel it."
+
+She glanced at him quickly, but did not speak.
+
+"There is a theory concerning this," he continued, "which has
+undoubtedly helped many people, and which may be found in the writings
+of certain modern psychologists. It is that we have a conscious, or
+lower, human self, and a subconscious, or better self. This subconscious
+self stretches down, as it were, into the depths of the universe and
+taps the source of spiritual power. And it is through the subconscious
+self that every man is potentially divine. Potentially, because the
+conscious self has to reach out by an effort of the will to effect this
+union with the spiritual in the subconscious, and when it is effected,
+it comes from the response of the subconscious. Apparently from without,
+as a gift, and therefore, in theological language, it is called grace.
+This is what is meant by being born again, the incarnation of the Spirit
+in the conscious, or human. The two selves are no longer divided, and
+the higher self assumes control,--takes the reins, so to speak.
+
+"It is interesting, as a theory. And the fact that it has been seriously
+combated by writers who deny such a function of the subconscious does
+not at all affect the reality of the experience.
+
+"Once we have had a vision of the true meaning of life a vision which
+stirs the energies of our being, what is called 'a sense of sin'
+inevitably follows. It is the discontent, the regret, in the light of a
+higher knowledge, for the lost opportunities, for a past life which
+has been uncontrolled by any unifying purpose, misspent in futile
+undertakings, wasted, perhaps, in follies and selfish caprices which
+have not only harmed ourselves but others. Although we struggle, yet
+by habit, by self-indulgence, by lack of a sustained purpose, we have
+formed a character from which escape seems hopeless. And we realize
+that in order to change ourselves, an actual regeneration of the will is
+necessary. For awhile, perchance, we despair of this. The effort to get
+out of the rut we have made for ourselves seems of no avail. And it
+is not, indeed, until we arrive, gradually or otherwise, and through a
+proper interpretation of the life of Christ, at the conviction that we
+may even never become useful in the divine scheme that we have a sense
+of what is called 'the forgiveness of sins.' This conviction, this
+grace, this faith to embark on the experiment accomplishes of itself
+the revival of the will, the rebirth which we had thought impossible. We
+discover our task, high or humble,--our cause. We grow marvellously at
+one with God's purpose, and we feel that our will is acting in the same
+direction as his. And through our own atonement we see the meaning of
+that other Atonement which led Christ to the Cross. We see that our
+conviction, our grace, has come through him, and how he died for our
+sins."
+
+"It's quite wonderful how logical and simple you make it, how thoroughly
+you have gone into it. You have solved it for yourself--and you will
+solve it for others many others."
+
+She rose, and he, too, got to his feet with a medley of feelings. The
+path along which they walked was already littered with green acorns.
+A gray squirrel darted ahead of them, gained a walnut and paused,
+quivering, halfway up the trunk, to gaze back at them. And the glance
+she presently gave him seemed to partake of the shyness of the wild
+thing.
+
+"Thank you for explaining it to me," she said.
+
+"I hope you don't think--" he began.
+
+"Oh, it isn't that!" she cried, with unmistakable reproach. "I
+asked you--I made you tell me. It hasn't seemed at all like--the
+confessional," she added, and smiled and blushed at the word. "You have
+put it so nicely, so naturally, and you have given me so much to think
+about. But it all depends--doesn't it?--upon whether one can feel the
+underlying truth of which you spoke in the first place; it rests upon
+a sense of the prevailing goodness of things. It seems to me cruel that
+what is called salvation, the solution of the problem of life, should
+depend upon an accidental discovery. We are all turned loose with our
+animal passions and instincts, of self-preservation, by an indifferent
+Creator, in a wilderness, and left to find our way out as best we can.
+You answer that Christ showed us the way. There are elements in his
+teaching I cannot accept--perhaps because I have been given a wrong
+interpretation of them. I shall ask you more questions some day.
+
+"But even then," she continued, "granted that Christ brought the
+complete solution, as you say, why should so many millions have lived
+and died, before and after his coming, who had suffered so, and who had
+never heard of him? That is the way my reason works, and I can't help
+it. I would help it if I could."
+
+"Isn't it enough," he asked, "to know that a force is at work combating
+evil,--even if you are not yet convinced that it is a prevailing force?
+Can you not trust that it will be a prevailing force, if your sympathies
+are with it, without demanding a revelation of the entire scheme of the
+universe? Of what use is it to doubt the eternal justice?"
+
+"Oh, use!" she cried, "I grant you its uselessness. Doubt seems an
+ingrained quality. I can't help being a fatalist."
+
+"And yet you have taken your life in your own hands," he reminded her,
+gently.
+
+"Only to be convinced of its futility," she replied.
+
+Again, momentarily thrust back into himself, he wondered jealously once
+more what the disillusionments had been of that experience from before
+which she seemed, at times, ready to draw back a little the veil.
+
+"A sense of futility is a sense of incompleteness," he said, "and
+generally precedes a sense of power."
+
+"Ah, you have gained that! Yet it must always have been latent in
+you--you make one feel it. But now!" she exclaimed, as though the
+discovery had just dawned on her, "now you will need power, now you will
+have to fight as you have never fought in your life."
+
+He found her enthusiasm as difficult to withstand as her stoicism.
+
+"Yes, I shall have to fight," he admitted. Her partisanship was sweet.
+
+"When you tell them what you have told me," she continued, as though
+working it out in her own mind, "they will never submit to it, if they
+can help it. My father will never submit to it. They will try to put you
+out, as a heretic,--won't they?"
+
+"I have an idea that they will," he conceded, with a smile.
+
+"And won't they succeed? Haven't they the power?"
+
+"It depends,--in the first place, on whether the bishop thinks me a
+heretic."
+
+"Have you asked him?"
+
+"No."
+
+"But can't they make you resign?"
+
+"They can deprive me of my salary."
+
+She did not press this.
+
+"You mustn't think me a martyr," he pleaded, in a lighter tone.
+
+She paid no heed to this protest, but continued to regard him with a
+face lighted by enthusiasm.
+
+"Oh, that's splendid of you!" she cried. "You are going to speak
+the truth as you see it, and let them do their worst. Of course,
+fundamentally, it isn't merely because they're orthodox that they won't
+like it, although they'll say so, and perhaps think so. It will be
+because if you have really found the truth--they will instinctively,
+fear its release. For it has a social bearing, too--hasn't it?--although
+you haven't explained that part of it."
+
+"It has a distinct social bearing," he replied, amazed at the way her
+mind flew forward and grasped the entire issue, in spite of the fact
+that her honesty still refused to concede his premises. Such were the
+contradictions in her that he loved. And, though she did not suspect it,
+she had in her the Crusader's spirit. "I have always remembered what
+you once said, that many who believed themselves Christians had an
+instinctive feeling that there is a spark in Christianity which, if
+allowed to fly, would start a conflagration beyond their control.
+And that they had covered the spark with ashes. I, too," he added
+whimsically, "was buried under the ashes."
+
+"And the spark," she demanded, "is not Socialism--their nightmare?"
+
+"The spark is Christianity itself--but I am afraid they will not be able
+to distinguish it from Socialism. The central paradox in Christianity
+consists in the harmonizing of the individual and socialistic spirit,
+and this removes it as far from the present political doctrine of
+socialism as it is possible to be. Christianity, looked at from a
+certain viewpoint,--and I think the proper viewpoint,--is the most
+individualistic of religions, since its basic principle is the
+development of the individual into an autonomous being."
+
+They stood facing each other on an open stretch of lawn. The place was
+deserted. Through the trees, in the near distance, the sightless front
+of the Ferguson mansion blazed under the September sun.
+
+"Individualistic!" she repeated, as though dazed by the word applied to
+the religion she had discarded. "I can't understand. Do you think I ever
+can understand?" she asked him, simply.
+
+"It seems to me you understand more than you are willing to give
+yourself credit for," he answered seriously. "You don't take into
+account your attitude."
+
+"I see what you mean--a willingness to take the right road, if I can
+find it. I am not at all sure that I want to take it. But you must tell
+me more--more of what you have discovered. Will you?"
+
+He just hesitated. She herself appeared to acknowledge no bar to their
+further intimacy--why should he?
+
+"I will tell you all I know," he said.
+
+Suddenly, as if by a transference of thought, she voiced what he had in
+mind.
+
+"You are going to tell them the truth about themselves!" she exclaimed.
+"--That they are not Christians!"
+
+His silence was an admission.
+
+"You must see," he told her, after the moment they had looked into each
+other's faces, "that this is the main reason why I must stay at St.
+John's, in the Church, if I conscientiously can."
+
+"I see. The easier course would be to resign, to have scruples. And you
+believe there is a future for the Church."
+
+"I believe it," he assented.
+
+She still held his eyes.
+
+"Yes, it is worth doing. If you see it that way it is more worth
+doing than anything else. Please don't think," she said, "that I don't
+appreciate why you have told me all this, why you have given me your
+reasons. I know it hasn't been easy. It's because you wish me to have
+faith in you for my own sake, not for yours. And I am grateful."
+
+"And if that faith is justified, as you will help to justify it, that it
+may be transferred to a larger sphere," he answered.
+
+She gave him her hand, but did not reply.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX. MR. GOODRICH BECOMES A PARTISAN
+
+
+
+I
+
+In these days of his preparation, she haunted him continually. In her
+he saw typified all those who possessed the divine discontent, the
+yearning unsatisfied,--the fatalists and the dreamers. And yet she
+seemed to have risen through instinct to share the fire of his vision
+of religion revealed to the countless ranks of strugglers as the hidden
+motive-power of the world, the impetus of scientist, statesman, artist,
+and philanthropist! They had stood together on the heights of the larger
+view, whence the whole of the battle-line lay disclosed.
+
+At other and more poignant moments he saw her as waving him bravely on
+while he steamed out through towering seas to safety. The impression
+was that of smiling at her destiny. Had she fixed upon it? and did
+she linger now only that she might inspire him in his charge? She was
+capable, he knew, of taking calmly the irrevocable step, of accepting
+the decree as she read it. The thought tortured, the desire to save her
+from herself obsessed him; with true clairvoyance she had divined him
+aright when she had said that he wished her to have faith in him for her
+own sake. Could he save her in spite of herself? and how? He could not
+see her, except by chance. Was she waiting until he should have crossed
+the bar before she should pay some inexorable penalty of which he knew
+nothing?
+
+Thus he speculated, suffered, was at once cast down and lifted up by
+the thought of her. To him, at least, she was one of those rare and
+dauntless women, the red stars of history, by whom the Dantes and
+Leonardos are fired to express the inexpressible, and common clay is
+fused and made mad: one of those women who, the more they reveal, become
+the more inscrutable. Divinely inarticulate, he called her; arousing the
+passion of the man, yet stirring the sublimer efforts of the god.
+
+What her feelings toward him, whether she loved him as a woman loves a
+man he could not say, no man being a judge in the supreme instance. She
+beheld him emancipated, perhaps, from what she might have called the
+fetters of an orthodoxy for which she felt an instinctive antagonism;
+but whether, though proclaiming himself free, the fact of his
+continuation in the ministry would not of itself set up in her a
+reaction, he was unable to predict. Her antipathy to forms, he saw,
+was inherent. Her interest--her fascinated absorption, it might be
+called--in his struggle was spiritual, indeed, but it also had mixed
+in it the individualistic zeal of the nonconformist. She resented the
+trammels of society; though she suffered from her efforts to transcend
+them. The course he had determined upon appeared to her as a rebellion
+not only against a cut-and-dried state of mind, but also against vested
+privilege. Yet she had in her, as she confessed, the craving for what
+privilege brings in the way of harmonious surroundings. He loved her for
+her contradictions.
+
+Thus he was utterly unable to see what the future held for him in the
+way of continued communion with her, to evolve any satisfactory theory
+as to why she remained in the city. She had told him that the gardens
+were an excuse. She had come, by her own intimation, to reflect, to
+decide some momentous question. Marriage? He found this too agitating to
+dwell upon, summoning, as it did, conjectures of the men she might have
+known; and it was perhaps natural, in view of her attitude, that he
+could only think of such a decision on her part as surrender.
+
+That he had caught and held her attention, although by no conscious
+effort of his own, was clear to him. But had he not merely arrested her?
+Would she not presently disappear, leaving only in his life the scarlet
+thread which she had woven into it for all time? Would he not fail to
+change, permanently, the texture of hers?
+
+Such were his hopes and fears concerning her, and they were mingled
+inextricably with other hopes and fears which had to do with the great
+venture of his life. He dwelt in a realm of paradoxes, discovered
+that exaltation was not incompatible with anxiety and dread. He had
+no thought of wavering; he had achieved to an extent he would not
+have believed possible the sense of consecration which brings with
+it indifference to personal fortunes, and the revelation of the inner
+world, and yet he shrank from the wounds he was about to receive--and
+give. Outwardly controlled, he lived in the state of intense excitement
+of the leader waiting for the time to charge.
+
+
+
+II
+
+The moment was at hand. September had waned, the nights were cooling,
+his parishioners were returning from the East. One of these was Eleanor
+Goodrich, whom he met on a corner, tanned and revived from her long
+summer in Massachusetts. She had inherited the kindly shrewdness of
+glance characteristic of gentlefolk, the glance that seeks to
+penetrate externals in its concern for the well-being of those whom it
+scrutinizes. And he was subtly aware, though she greeted him cordially,
+that she felt a change in him without being able to account for it.
+
+"I hear you have been here all summer," she said reproachfully. "Mother
+and father and all of us were much disappointed that you did not come to
+us on the Cape."
+
+"I should have come, if it had been possible," he replied. "It seems to
+have done you a world of good."
+
+"Oh, I!" She seemed slightly embarrassed, puzzled, and did not look at
+him. "I am burned as disgracefully as Evelyn. Phil came on for a month.
+
+"He tells me he hasn't seen you, but that isn't surprising, for he
+hasn't been to church since June--and he's a vestryman now, too."
+
+She was in mourning for her father-in-law, who had died in the spring.
+Phil Goodrich had taken his place. Eleanor found the conversation,
+somehow, drifting out of her control. It was not at all what she would
+have desired to say. Her colour heightened.
+
+"I have not been conducting the services, but I resume them next
+Sunday," said the rector. "I ought to tell you," he went on, regarding
+her, "in view of the conversation we have had, that I have changed my
+mind concerning a great many things we have talked about--although
+I have not spoken of this as yet to any of the members of the
+congregation."
+
+She was speechless, and could only stare at him blankly.
+
+"I mean," he continued, with a calmness that astonished her afterwards,
+"that I have changed my whole conception as to the functions and future
+of the Church, that I have come to your position, that we must make up
+our minds for ourselves, and not have them made up for us. And that
+we must examine into the truth of all statements, and be governed
+accordingly."
+
+Her attitude was one of mingled admiration, concern, and awe. And he saw
+that she had grasped something of the complications which his course was
+likely to bring about.
+
+"But you are not going to leave us!" she managed to exclaim.
+
+"Not if it is possible to remain," he said, smiling.
+
+"I am so glad." She was still overpowered by the disclosure. "It is good
+of you to tell me. Do you mind my telling Phil?"
+
+"Not at all," he assured her.
+
+"Will you forgive me," she asked, after a slight pause during which she
+had somewhat regained her composure, "if I say that I always thought,
+or rather hoped you would change? that your former beliefs seemed
+so--unlike you?"
+
+He continued to smile at her as she stepped forward to take the car.
+
+"I'll have to forgive you," he answered, "because you were right--"
+
+She was still in such a state of excitement when she arrived down town
+that she went direct to her husband's law office.
+
+"I like this!" he exclaimed, as, unannounced, she opened the door of
+his sanctuary. "You might have caught me with one of those good-looking
+clients of mine."
+
+"Oh, Phil!" she cried, "I've got such a piece of news, I couldn't resist
+coming to tell you. I met Mr. Hodder--and he's changed."
+
+"Changed!" Phil repeated, looking up at her flushed face beside him.
+Instead of a law-book, he flung down a time table in which he had been
+investigating the trains to a quail shooting club in the southern part
+of the state: The transition to Mr. Hodder was, therefore, somewhat
+abrupt. "Why, Nell, to look at you, I thought it could be nothing else
+than my somewhat belated appointment to the United States Supreme Court.
+How has Hodder changed? I always thought him pretty decent."
+
+"Don't laugh at me," she begged, "it's really serious--and no one knows
+it yet. He said I might tell you. Do you remember that talk we had
+at father's, when he first came, and we likened him to a modern
+Savonarola?"
+
+"And George Bridges took the floor, and shocked mother and Lucy and
+Laureston," supplied Phil.
+
+"I don't believe mother really was as much shocked as she appeared to
+be," said Eleanor. "At any rate, the thing that had struck us--you and
+me--was that Mr. Hodder looked as though he could say something helpful,
+if he only would. And then I went to see him afterwards, in the parish
+house--you remember?--after we had been reading modern criticism
+together, and he told me that the faith which had come down from
+the fathers was like an egg? It couldn't be chipped. I was awfully
+disappointed--and yet I couldn't help liking him, he was so honest. And
+the theological books he gave me to read--which were so mediaeval and
+absurd! Well, he has come around to our point of view. He told me so
+himself."
+
+"But what is our point of view, Nell?" her husband asked, with a smile.
+"Isn't it a good deal like Professor Bridges', only we're not quite
+so learned? We're just ordinary heathens, as far as I can make out. If
+Hodder has our point of view, he ought to go into the law or a trust
+company."
+
+"Oh, Phil!" she protested, "and you're on the vestry! I do believe in
+Something, and so do you."
+
+"Something," he observed, "is hardly a concrete and complete theology."
+
+"Why do you make me laugh," she reproached him, "when the matter is so
+serious? What I'm trying to tell you is that I'm sure Mr. Hodder has
+worked it out. He's too sincere to remain in the Church and not have
+something constructive and satisfying. I've always said that he seemed
+to have a truth shut up inside of him which he could not communicate.
+Well, now he looks as though he were about to communicate it, as though
+he had discovered it. I suppose you think me silly, but you'll grant,
+whatever Mr. Hodder may be, he isn't silly. And women can feel these
+things. You know I'm not given to sentimentality, but I was never so
+impressed by the growth in any personality as I was this morning by his.
+He seems to have become himself, as I always imagined him. And, Phil, he
+was so fine! He's absolutely incapable of posing, as you'll admit, and
+he stood right up and acknowledged that he'd been wrong in our argument.
+He hasn't had the services all summer, and when he resumes them next
+Sunday I gathered that he intends to make his new position clear."
+
+Mr. Goodrich thrust his hands in his pockets and gave a low whistle.
+
+"I guess I won't go shooting Saturday, after all," he declared. "I
+wouldn't miss Hodder's sermon for all the quail in Harrington County."
+
+"It's high time you did go to church," remarked Eleanor, contemplating,
+not without pride, her husband's close-cropped, pugnacious head.
+
+"Your judgments are pretty sound, Nell. I'll do you that credit. And I've
+always owned up that Hodder would be a fighter if he ever got started.
+It's written all over him. What's more, I've a notion that some of our
+friends are already a little suspicious of him."
+
+"You mean Mr. Parr?" she asked, anxiously.
+
+"No, Wallis Plimpton."
+
+"Oh!" she exclaimed, with disdain in her voice.
+
+"Mr. Parr only got back yesterday, and Wallis told me that Hodder had
+refused to go on a yachting trip with him. Not only foolishness, but
+high treason." Phil smiled. "Plimpton's the weather-vane, the barometer
+of that crowd--he feels a disturbance long before it turns up--he's as
+sensitive as the stock market."
+
+"He is the stock market," said Eleanor.
+
+"It's been my opinion," Phil went on reflectively, "that they've all had
+just a trace of uneasiness about Hodder all along, an idea that Nelson
+Langmaid slipped up for the first time in his life when he got him to
+come. Oh, the feeling's been dormant, but it existed. And they've been
+just a little afraid that they couldn't handle him if the time ever
+came. He's not their type. When I saw Plimpton at the Country Club the
+other day he wondered, in that genial, off-hand manner of his, whether
+Hodder would continue to be satisfied with St. John's. Plimpton said he
+might be offered a missionary diocese. Oh we'll have a fine old row."
+
+"I believe," said Eleanor, "that that's the only thing that interests
+you."
+
+"Well, it does please me," he admitted, "when I think of Gordon Atterbury
+and Everett Constable and a few others,--Eldon Parr,--who believe that
+religion ought to be kept archaic and innocuous, served in a form that
+won't bother anybody. By the way, Nell, do you remember the verse the
+Professor quoted about the Pharisees, and cleansing the outside of the
+cup and platter?"
+
+"Yes," she answered, "why?"
+
+"Well--Hodder didn't give you any intimation as to what he intended to
+do about that sort of thing, did he?"
+
+"What sort of thing?"
+
+"About the inside of Eldon Parr's cup,--so to speak. And the inside of
+Wallis Plimpton's cup, and Everett Constable's cup, and Ferguson's cup,
+and Langmaid's. Did it ever strike you that, in St. John's, we have the
+sublime spectacle of Eldon Parr, the Pharisee in chief, conducting the
+Church of Christ, who, uttered that denunciation? That's what George
+Bridges meant. There's something rather ironical in such a situation, to
+say the least."
+
+"I see," said Eleanor, thoughtfully.
+
+"And what's more, it's typical," continued Phil, energetically, "the big
+Baptist church on the Boulevard is run by old Sedges, as canny a rascal
+as you could find in the state. The inside of has cup has never been
+touched, though he was once immersed in the Mississippi, they say, and
+swallowed a lot of water."
+
+"Oh, Phil!"
+
+"Hodder's been pretty intimate with Eldon Parr--that always puzzled me,"
+Phil went on. "And yet I'm like you, I never doubted Hodder's honesty.
+I've always been curious to know what would happen when he found out the
+kind of thing Eldon Parr is doing every day in his life, making people
+stand and deliver in the interest of what he would call National
+Prosperity. Why, that fellow, Funk, they sent to the penitentiary the
+other day for breaking into the Addicks' house isn't a circumstance to
+Eldon Parr. He's robbed his tens of thousands, and goes on robbing them
+right along. By the way, Mr. Parr took most of Addicks' money before
+Funk got his silver."
+
+"Phil, you have such a ridiculous way of putting things! But I suppose
+it's true."
+
+"True! I should say it was! There was Mr. Bentley--that was mild. And
+there never was a hold-up of a western express that could compare to the
+Consolidated Tractions. Some of these big fellows have the same kind
+of brain as the professional thieves. Well, they are professional
+thieves--what's the use of mincing matters! They never try the same game
+twice. Mr. Parr's getting ready to make another big haul right now. I
+know, because Plimpton said as much, although he didn't confide in
+me what this particular piece of rascality is. He knows better." Phil
+Goodrich looked grim.
+
+"But the law?" exclaimed his wife.
+
+"There never was a law that Nelson Langmaid couldn't drive a horse and
+carriage through."
+
+"And Mr. Langmaid's one of the nicest men I know!"
+
+"What I wonder," mused Phil, "is whether this is a mere doctrinal revolt
+on Hodder's part, or whether he has found out a few things. There are
+so many parsons in these days who don't seem to see any inconsistency
+in robbing several thousand people to build settlement houses and
+carved marble altars, and who wouldn't accept a Christmas box from a
+highwayman. But I'll do Hodder the justice to say he doesn't strike me
+as that kind. And I have an idea that Eldon Parr and Wallis Plimpton
+and the rest know he isn't, know that he'd be a Tartar if he ever get
+started, and that's what makes them uneasy."
+
+"Then it isn't his change of religious opinions they would care about?"
+said Eleanor.
+
+"Oh, I don't say that Eldon Parr won't try to throw him out if he
+questions the faith as delivered by the Saints."
+
+"Phil, what a way of putting it!"
+
+"Any indication of independence, any approach to truth would be regarded
+as dangerous," Phil continued. "And of course Gordon Atterbury and others
+we could mention, who think they believe in the unchipped egg theory,
+will be outraged. But it's deeper than that. Eldon Parr will give orders
+that Hodder's to go."
+
+"Give orders?"
+
+"Certainly. That vestry, so far as Mr. Parr is concerned, is a mere
+dummy board of directors. He's made Langmaid, and Plimpton, and even
+Everett Constable, who's the son of an honourable gentleman, and ought
+to know better. And he can ruin them by snapping his fingers. He can
+even make the financial world too hot for Ferguson. I'll say this
+for Gordon Atterbury, that Mr. Parr can't control him, but he's got a
+majority without him, and Gordon won't vote for a heretic. Who are left,
+except father-in-law Waring and myself?"
+
+"He can't control either of you!" said Eleanor, proudly.
+
+"When it comes to that, Nell--we'll move into Canada and buy a farm."
+
+"But can he hurt you, Phil--either of you?" she asked, after a moment.
+
+"I'd like to see him try it," Phil Goodrich declared
+
+And his wife thought, as she looked at him, that she would like to see
+Mr. Parr try it, too.
+
+
+
+III
+
+Phil Goodrich had once said that Mr. Plimpton's translation of the
+national motto E pluribus unum, was "get together," and it was true that
+not the least of Mr. Plimpton's many gifts was that of peace making.
+Such was his genius that he scented trouble before it became manifest
+to the world, and he stoutly declared that no difference of opinion ever
+existed between reasonable men that might not be patched up before the
+breach became too wide--provided that a third reasonable man contributed
+his services. The qualifying word "reasonable" is to be noted. When Mr.
+Bedloe Hubbell had undertaken, in the name of Reform, to make a witch's
+cauldron of the city's politics, which Mr. Beatty had hitherto
+conducted so smoothly from the back room of his saloon, Mr. Plimpton had
+unselfishly offered his services. Bedloe Hubbell, although he had been a
+playmate of Mr. Plimpton's wife's, had not proved "reasonable," and had
+rejected with a scorn only to be deemed fanatical the suggestion that
+Mr. Hubbell's interests and Mr. Beatty's interests need not clash, since
+Mr. Hubbell might go to Congress! And Mr. Plimpton was the more hurt
+since the happy suggestion was his own, and he had had no little
+difficulty in getting Mr. Beatty to agree to it.
+
+Yet Mr. Plimpton's career in the ennobling role of peacemaker had, on
+the whole, been crowned with such success as to warrant his belief in
+the principle. Mr. Parr, for instance,--in whose service, as in that
+of any other friend, Mr. Plimpton was always ready to act--had had
+misunderstandings with eminent financiers, and sometimes with United
+States Senators. Mr. Plimpton had made many trips to the Capitol at
+Washington, sometimes in company with Mr. Langmaid, sometimes not, and
+on one memorable occasion had come away smiling from an interview with
+the occupant of the White House himself.
+
+Lest Mr. Plimpton's powers of premonition seem supernatural, it may
+be well to reveal the comparative simplicity of his methods. Genius,
+analyzed, is often disappointing, Mr. Plimpton's was selective and
+synthetic. To illustrate in a particular case, he had met Mr. Parr
+in New York and had learned that the Reverend Mr. Hodder had not only
+declined to accompany the banker on a yachting trip, but had elected to
+remain in the city all summer, in his rooms in the parish house, while
+conducting no services. Mr. Parr had thought this peculiar. On his
+return home Mr. Plimpton had one day dropped in to see a Mr. Gaines,
+the real estate agent for some of his property. And Mr. Plimpton being
+hale-fellow-well-met, Mr. Gaines had warned him jestingly that he
+would better not let his parson know that he owned a half interest in a
+certain hotel in Dalton Street, which was leased at a profitable rate.
+
+If Mr. Plimpton felt any uneasiness, he did not betray it. And he
+managed to elicit from the agent, in an entirely casual and jovial
+manner, the fact that Mr. Hodder, a month or so before, had settled
+the rent of a woman for a Dalton Street flat, and had been curious to
+discover the name of the owner. Mr. Gaines, whose business it was to
+recognize everybody, was sure of Mr. Hodder, although he had not worn
+clerical clothes.
+
+Mr. Plimpton became very thoughtful when he had left the office. He
+visited Nelson Langmaid in the Parr Building. And the result of the
+conference was to cause Mr. Langmaid to recall, with a twinge of
+uneasiness, a certain autumn morning in a room beside Bremerton Lake
+when he had been faintly yet distinctly conscious of the admonitory
+whisperings of that sixth sense which had saved him on other occasions.
+
+"Dash it!" he said to himself, after Mr. Plimpton had departed, and
+he stood in the window and gazed across at the flag on the roof of
+'Ferguson's.' "It would serve me right for meddling in this parson
+business. Why did I take him away from Jerry Whitely, anyhow?"
+
+It added to Nelson Langmaid's discomfort that he had a genuine
+affection, even an admiration for the parson in question. He might have
+known by looking at the man that he would wake up some day,--such was
+the burden of his lament. And there came to him, ironically out of
+the past, the very words of Mr. Parr's speech to the vestry after Dr.
+Gilman's death, that succinct list of qualifications for a new rector
+which he himself, Nelson Langmaid, had humorously and even more
+succinctly epitomized. Their "responsibility to the parish, to the city,
+and to God" had been to find a rector "neither too old nor too young,
+who would preach the faith as we received it, who was not sensational,
+and who did not mistake Socialism for Christianity." At the "Socialism"
+a certain sickly feeling possessed the lawyer, and he wiped beads of
+perspiration from his dome-like forehead.
+
+He didn't pretend to be versed in theology--so he had declared--and at
+the memory of these words of his the epithet "ass," self applied, passed
+his lips. "You want a parson who will stick to his last, not too high or
+too low or too broad or too narrow, who has intellect without too
+much initiative... and will not get the church uncomfortably full
+of strangers and run you out of your pews." Thus he had capped the
+financier. Well, if they had caught a tartar, it served him, Nelson
+Langmaid, right. He recalled his talk with Gerald Whitely, and how his
+brother-in-law had lost his temper when they had got on the subject of
+personality....
+
+Perhaps Wallis Plimpton could do something. Langmaid's hopes of this
+were not high. It may have been that he had suspicions of what Mr.
+Plimpton would have called Hodder's "reasonableness." One thing was
+clear--that Mr. Plimpton was frightened. In the sanctuaries, the private
+confessionals of high finance (and Nelson Langmaid's office may be
+called so), the more primitive emotions are sometimes exhibited.
+
+"I don't see what business it is of a clergyman, or of any one else,
+whether I own property in Dalton Street," Mr. Plimpton had said, as he
+sat on the edge of the lawyer's polished mahogany desk. "What does he
+expect us to do,--allow our real estate to remain unproductive merely
+for sentimental reasons? That's like a parson, most of 'em haven't got
+any more common sense than that. What right has he got to go nosing
+around Dalton Street? Why doesn't he stick to his church?"
+
+"I thought you fellows were to build him a settlement house there,"
+Langmaid observed.
+
+"On the condition that he wouldn't turn socialist."
+
+"You'd better have stipulated it in the bond," said the lawyer, who
+could not refrain, even at this solemn moment, from the temptation of
+playing upon Mr. Plimpton's apprehensions. "I'm afraid he'll make it his
+business, Wallis, to find out whether you own anything in Dalton Street.
+I'll bet he's got a list of Dalton Street property in his pocket right
+now."
+
+Mr. Plimpton groaned.
+
+"Thank God I don't own any of it!" said Langmaid.
+
+"What the deuce does he intend to do?" the other demanded.
+
+"Read it out in church," Langmaid suggested. "It wouldn't sound pretty,
+Wallis, to be advertised in the post on Monday morning as owning that
+kind of a hotel."
+
+"Oh, he's a gentleman," said Mr. Plimpton, "he wouldn't do anything as
+low as that!"
+
+"But if he's become a socialist?" objected Langmaid.
+
+"He wouldn't do it," his friend reiterated, none too confidently. "I
+shouldn't be surprised if he made me resign from the vestry and forced
+me to sell my interest. It nets me five thousand a year."
+
+"What is the place?" Langmaid asked sympathetically, "Harrod's?"
+
+Mr. Plimpton nodded.
+
+"Not that I am a patron," the lawyer explained somewhat hastily. "But
+I've seen the building, going home."
+
+"It looks to me as if it would burn down some day, Wallis."
+
+"I wish it would," said Mr. Plimpton.
+
+"If it's any comfort to you--to us," Langmaid went on, after a moment,
+"Eldon Parr owns the whole block above Thirteenth, on the south
+side--bought it three years ago. He thinks the business section will
+grow that way."
+
+"I know," said Mr. Plimpton, and they looked at each other.
+
+The name predominant in both minds had been mentioned.
+
+"I wonder if Hodder really knows what he's up against." Mr. Plimpton
+sometimes took refuge in slang.
+
+"Well, after all, we're not sure yet that he's 'up against anything,'"
+replied Langmaid, who thought the time had come for comfort. "It may
+all be a false alarm. There's no reason, after all, why a Christian
+clergyman shouldn't rescue women in Dalton Street, and remain in the
+city to study the conditions of the neighbourhood where his settlement
+house is to be. And just, because you or I would not be able to resist
+an invitation to go yachting with Eldon Parr, a man might be imagined
+who had that amount of moral courage."
+
+"That's just it. Hodder seems to me, now I come to think of it, just
+the kind of John Brown type who wouldn't hesitate to get into a row
+with Eldon Parr if he thought it was right, and pull down any amount of
+disagreeable stuff about our ears."
+
+"You're mixing your heroes, Wallis," said Langmaid.
+
+"I can't help it. You'd catch it, too, Nelson. What in the name of sense
+possessed you to get such a man?"
+
+This being a question the lawyer was unable to answer, the conversation
+came to another pause. And it was then that Mr. Plimpton's natural
+optimism reasserted itself.
+
+"It isn't done,--the thing we're afraid of, that's all," he proclaimed,
+after a turn or two about the room. "Hodder's a gentleman, as I said,
+and if he feels as we suspect he does he'll resign like a gentleman and
+a Christian. I'll have a talk with him--oh, you can trust me! I've got
+an idea. Gordon Atterbury told me the other day there is a vacancy in a
+missionary diocese out west, and that Hodder's name had been mentioned,
+among others, to the bishops for the place. He'd make a rattling
+missionary bishop, you know, holding services in saloons and knocking
+men's heads together for profanity, and he boxes like a professional.
+Now, a word from Eldon Parr might turn the trick. Every parson wants to
+be a bishop."
+
+Langmaid shook his head.
+
+"You're getting out of your depths, my friend. The Church isn't
+Wall Street. And missionary bishops aren't chosen to make convenient
+vacancies."
+
+"I don't mean anything crude," Mr. Plimpton protested. "But a word
+from the chief layman of a diocese like this, a man who never misses
+a General Convention, and does everything handsomely, might
+count,--particularly if they're already thinking of Hodder. The bishops
+would never suspect we wanted to get rid of him."
+
+"Well," said Langmaid, "I advise you to go easy, all along the line."
+
+"Oh, I'll go easy enough," Mr. Plimpton assented, smiling. "Do you
+remember how I pulled off old Senator Matthews when everybody swore he
+was dead set on voting for an investigation in the matter of those coal
+lands Mr. Parr got hold of in his state?"
+
+"Matthews isn't Hodder, by a long shat," said Langmaid. "If you ask me
+my opinion, I'll tell you frankly that if Hodder has made up his mind
+to stay in St. John's a ton of dynamite and all the Eldon Parrs in the
+nation can't get him out."
+
+"Can't the vestry make him resign?" asked Mr. Plimpton, uncomfortably.
+
+"You'd better, go home and study your canons, my friend. Nothing short
+of conviction for heresy can do it, if he doesn't want to go."
+
+"You wouldn't exactly call him a heretic," Mr. Plimpton said ruefully.
+
+"Would you know a heretic if you saw one?" demanded Langmaid.
+
+"No, but my wife would, and Gordon Atterbury and Constable would, and
+Eldon Parr. But don't let's get nervous."
+
+"Well, that's sensible at any rate," said Langmaid....
+
+So Mr. Plimpton had gone off optimistic, and felt even more so the next
+morning after he had had his breakfast in the pleasant dining room of
+the Gore Mansion, of which he was now master. As he looked out through
+the open window at the sunshine in the foliage of Waverley Place,
+the prospect of his being removed from that position of dignity and
+influence on the vestry of St. John's, which he had achieved, with
+others, after so much walking around the walls, seemed remote. And he
+reflected with satisfaction upon the fact that his wife, who was his
+prime minister, would be home from the East that day. Two heads were
+better than one, especially if one of the two were Charlotte Gore's.
+And Mr. Plimpton had often reflected upon the loss to the world, and the
+gain to himself, that she was a woman.
+
+It would not be gallant to suggest that his swans were geese.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The successful navigation of lower Tower Street, at noonday, required
+presence of mind on the part of the pedestrian. There were currents and
+counter-currents, eddies and backwaters, and at the corner of Vine a
+veritable maelstrom through which two lines of electric cars pushed
+their way, east and weft, north and south, with incessant clanging
+of bells; followed by automobiles with resounding horns, trucks and
+delivery wagons with wheels reverberating on the granite. A giant Irish
+policeman, who seemed in continual danger of a violent death, and wholly
+indifferent to it, stood between the car tracks and halted the rush from
+time to time, driving the people like sheep from one side to the other.
+Through the doors of Ferguson's poured two conflicting streams of
+humanity, and wistful groups of young women, on the way from hasty
+lunches, blocked the pavements and stared at the finery behind the
+plate-glass windows.
+
+The rector, slowly making his way westward, permitted himself to be
+thrust hither and thither, halted and shoved on again as he studied the
+faces of the throng. And presently he found himself pocketed before one
+of the exhibits of feminine interest, momentarily helpless, listening
+to the admiring and envious chorus of a bevy of diminutive shop-girls
+on the merits of a Paris gown. It was at this moment that he perceived,
+pushing towards him with an air of rescue, the figure of his vestryman,
+Mr. Wallis Plimpton.
+
+"Well, well, well!" he cried, as he seized Hodder by the arm and pulled
+him towards the curb. "What are you doing herein the marts of trade?
+Come right along with me to the Eyrie, and we'll have something, to
+eat."
+
+The Eyrie was a famous lunch club, of limited membership, at the top of
+the Parr Building, where financial affairs of the first importance were
+discussed and settled.
+
+Hodder explained that he had lunched at half-past twelve.
+
+"Well, step into my office a minute. It does me good, to see you again,
+upon my word, and I can't let you get by without a little pow-wow."
+
+Mr. Plimpton's trust company, in Vine Street, resembled a Greek temple.
+Massive but graceful granite columns adorned its front, while within it
+was partitioned off with polished marble and ornamental grills. In the
+rear, guarded by the desks and flanked by the compartments of various
+subordinates, was the president's private sanctum, and into this holy of
+holies Mr. Plimpton led the way with the simple, unassuming genial air
+of the high priest of modern finance who understands men. The room
+was eloquent almost to affectation of the system and order of great
+business, inasmuch as it betrayed not the least sign of a workshop. On
+the dark oak desk were two leather-bound books and a polished telephone.
+The walls were panelled, there was a stone fireplace with andirons
+set, a deep carpet spread over the tessellated floor, and three
+leather-padded armchairs, one of which Mr. Plimpton hospitably drew
+forward for the rector. He then produced a box of cigars.
+
+"You don't smoke, Mr. Hodder. I always forget. That's the way you manage
+to keep yourself in such good shape." He drew out a gold match box and
+seated himself with an air of gusto opposite his guest. "And you haven't
+had a vacation, they tell me."
+
+"On the contrary," said the rector, "McCrae has taken the services all
+summer."
+
+"But you've been in the city!" Mr. Plimpton exclaimed, puffing at his
+cigar.
+
+"Yes, I've been in the city."
+
+"Well, well, I'll bet you haven't been idle. Just between us, as
+friends, Mr. Hodder, I've often wondered if you didn't work too
+hard--there's such a thing as being too conscientious, you know.
+And I've an idea that the rest of the vestry think so. Mr. Parr, for
+instance. We know when we've got a good thing, and we don't want to wear
+you out. Oh, we can appreciate your point of view, and admire it. But a
+little relaxation--eh? It's too bad that you couldn't have seen your way
+to take that cruise--Mr. Parr was all cut up about it. I guess you're
+the only man among all of us fairly close to him, who really knows him
+well," said Mr. Plimpton, admiringly. "He thinks a great deal of you,
+Mr. Hodder. By the way, have you seen him since he got back?"
+
+"No," Hodder answered.
+
+
+"The trip did him good. I thought he was a little seedy in the
+spring--didn't you? Wonderful man! And when I think how he's slandered
+and abused it makes me hot. And he never says anything, never
+complains, lives up there all alone, and takes his medicine. That's
+real patriotism, according to my view. He could retire to-morrow--but
+he keeps on--why? Because he feels the weight of a tremendous
+responsibility on his shoulders, because he knows if it weren't for him
+and men like him upon whom the prosperity of this nation depends, we'd
+have famine and anarchy on our hands in no time. And look what he's
+done for the city, without ostentation, mind you! He never blows his own
+horn-never makes a speech. And for the Church! But I needn't tell you.
+When this settlement house and chapel are finished, they'll be coming
+out here from New York to get points. By the way, I meant to have
+written you. Have our revised plans come yet? We ought to break ground
+in November, oughtn't we?"
+
+"I intend to lay my views on that matter before the vestry at the next
+meeting, the rector said.
+
+"Well," declared Mr. Plimpton, after a scarcely perceptible pause, "I've
+no doubt they'll be worth listening to. If I were to make a guess," he
+continued, with a contemplative smile, blowing a thin stream of smoke
+towards the distant ceiling, "I should bet that you have spent your
+summer looking over the ground. I don't say that you have missed your
+vocation, Mr. Hodder, but I don't mind telling you that for a clergyman,
+for a man absorbed in spiritual matters, a man who can preach
+the sermons you preach, you've got more common-sense and business
+thoroughness than any one I have ever run across in your profession."
+
+"Looking over the ground?" Hodder repeated, ignoring the compliment.
+
+"Sure," said Mr. Plimpton, smiling more benignly than ever. "You mustn't
+be modest about it. Dalton Street. And when that settlement house is
+built, I'll guarantee it will be run on a business basis. No nonsense."
+
+"What do you mean by nonsense?" Hodder asked. He did not make the
+question abrupt, and there was even the hint of a smile in his eyes,
+which Mr. Plimpton found the more disquieting.
+
+"Why, that's only a form of speech. I mean you'll be practical,
+efficient, that you'll get hold of the people of that neighbourhood and
+make 'em see that the world isn't such a bad place after all, make 'em
+realize that we in St. John's want to help 'em out. That you won't
+make them more foolishly discontented than they are, and go preaching
+socialism to them."
+
+"I have no intention of preaching socialism," said Hodder. But he laid a
+slight emphasis on the word which sent a cold shiver down Mr. Plimpton's
+spine, and made him wonder whether there might not be something worse
+than socialism.
+
+"I knew you wouldn't," he declared, with all the heartiness he could
+throw into his voice. "I repeat, you're a practical, sensible man.
+I'll yield to none in my belief in the Church as a moral, uplifting,
+necessary spiritual force in our civilization, in my recognition of her
+high ideals, but we business men, Mr. Hodder,--as--I am sure you must
+agree,--have got to live, I am sorry to say, on a lower plane. We've
+got to deal with the world as we find it, and do our little best to help
+things along. We can't take the Gospel literally, or we should all be
+ruined in a day, and swamp everybody else. You understand me?
+
+"I understand you," said the rector.
+
+Mr. Plimpton's cigar had gone out. In spite of himself, he had slipped
+from the easy-going, casual tone into one that was becoming persuasive,
+apologetic, strenuous. Although the day was not particularly warm, he
+began to perspire a little; and he repeated the words over to himself,
+"I understand you." What the deuce did the rector know? He had somehow
+the air of knowing everything--more than Mr. Plimpton did. And Mr.
+Plimpton was beginning to have the unusual and most disagreeable feeling
+of having been weighed in the balance and found wanting. He glanced at
+his guest, who sat quite still, the head bent a trifle, the disturbing
+gray eyes fixed contemplatively an him--accusingly. And yet the
+accusation did not seem personal with the clergyman, whose eyes were
+nearly the medium, the channels of a greater, an impersonal Ice. It was
+true that the man had changed. He was wholly baffling to Mr. Plimpton,
+whose sense of alarm increased momentarily into an almost panicky
+feeling as he remembered what Langmaid had said. Was this inscrutable
+rector of St. John's gazing, knowingly, at the half owner of Harrods
+Hotel in Dalton Street, who couldn't take the Gospel literally?
+There was evidently no way to find out at once, and suspense would be
+unbearable, in vain he told himself that these thoughts were nonsense,
+the discomfort persisted, and he had visions of that career in which
+he had become one of the first citizens and the respected husband of
+Charlotte Gore clashing down about his ears. Why? Because a clergyman
+should choose to be quixotic, fanatical? He did not took quixotic,
+fanatical, Mr. Plimpton had to admit,--but a good deal saner than he,
+Mr. Plimpton, must have appeared at that moment. His throat was dry, and
+he didn't dare to make the attempt to relight his cigar.
+
+"There's nothing like getting together--keeping in touch with people,
+Mr. Hodder," he managed to say. "I've been out of town a good deal this
+summer--putting on a little flesh, I'm sorry to admit. But I've been
+meaning to drop into the parish house and talk over those revised plans
+with you. I will drop in--in a day or two. I'm interested in the work,
+intensely interested, and so is Mrs. Plimpton. She'll help you. I'm
+sorry you can't lunch with me."
+
+He had the air, now, of the man who finds himself disagreeably and
+unexpectedly closeted with a lunatic; and his language, although he
+sought to control it, became even a trifle less coherent.
+
+"You must make allowances for us business men, Mr. Hodder. I mean, of
+course, we're sometimes a little lax in our duties--in the summer, that
+is. Don't shoot the pianist, he's doing his--ahem! You know the story.
+
+"By the way, I hear great things of you; I'm told it's on the cards that
+you're to be made a bishop."
+
+"Oh," answered the rector, "there are better men mentioned than I!"
+
+"I want you to know this," said his vestryman, as he seized Hodder's
+hand, "much as we value you here, bitterly as we should hate to lose
+you, none of us, I am sure, would stand in the way of such a deserved
+advancement."
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Plimpton," said the rector.
+
+Mr. Plimpton watched the vigorous form striding through the great
+chamber until it disappeared. Then he seized his hat and made his way
+as rapidly as possible through the crowds to the Parr Building. At the
+entrance of the open-air roof garden of the Eyrie he ran into Nelson
+Langmaid.
+
+"You're the very man I'm after," said Mr. Plimpton, breathlessly. "I
+stopped in your office, and they said you'd gone up."
+
+"What's the matter, Wallis?" inquired the lawyer, tranquilly. "You look
+as if you'd lost a couple of bonds."
+
+"I've just seen Hodder, and he is going to do it."
+
+"Do what?"
+
+"Sit down here, at this table in the corner, and I'll tell you."
+
+For a practical man, it must be admitted that Mr. Plimpton had very
+little of the concrete to relate. And it appeared on cross-examination
+by Mr. Langmaid, who ate his cold meat and salad with an exasperating
+and undiminished appetite--that the only definite thing the rector had
+said was that he didn't intend to preach socialism. This was reassuring.
+
+"Reassuring!" exclaimed Mr. Plimpton, whose customary noonday hunger was
+lacking, "I wish you could have heard him say it!"
+
+"The wicked," remarked the lawyer, "flee when no man pursueth. Don't
+shoot the pianist!" Langmaid set down his beer, and threw back his
+head and laughed. "If I were the Reverend Mr. Hodder, after such an
+exhibition as you gave, I should immediately have suspected the pianist
+of something, and I should have gone off by myself and racked my brains
+and tried to discover what it was. He's a clever man, and if he hasn't
+got a list of Dalton Street property now he'll have one by to-morrow,
+and the story of some of your transactions with Tom Beatty and the City
+Council."
+
+"I believe you'd joke in the electric chair," said Mr. a Plimpton,
+resentfully. "I'll tell you this,--and my experience backs me up,--if
+you can't get next to a man by a little plain talk, he isn't safe. I
+haven't got the market sense for nothing, and I'll give you this tip,
+Nelson,--it's time to stand from under. Didn't I warn you fellows that
+Bedloe Hubbell meant business long before he started in? and this parson
+can give Hubbell cards and spades. Hodder can't see this thing as it
+is. He's been thinking, this summer. And a man of that kind is downright
+dangerous when he begins to think. He's found out things, and he's put
+two and two together, and he's the uncompromising type. He has a notion
+that the Gospel can be taken literally, and I could feel all the time I
+was talking to him he thought I was a crook."
+
+"Perhaps he was right," observed the lawyer.
+
+"That comes well from you," Mr. Plimpton retorted.
+
+"Oh, I'm a crook, too," said Langmaid. "I discovered it some time ago.
+The difference between you and me, Wallis, is that I am willing to
+acknowledge it, and you're not. The whole business world, as we know
+it, is crooked, and if we don't cut other people's throats, they'll cut
+ours."
+
+"And if we let go, what would happen to the country?" his companion
+demanded.
+
+Langmaid began to shake with silent laughter.
+
+"Your solicitude about the country, Wallis, is touching. I was brought
+up to believe that patriotism had an element of sacrifice in it, but
+I can't see ours. And I can't imagine myself, somehow, as a Hercules
+bearing the burden of our Constitution. From Mr. Hodder's point of view,
+perhaps,--and I'm not sure it isn't the right one, the pianist is doing
+his damnedest, to the tune of--Dalton Street. We might as well look this
+thing in the face, my friend. You and I really don't believe in another
+world, or we shouldn't be taking so much trouble to make this one as
+we'd like to have it."
+
+"I never expected to hear you talk this way," said Mr. Plimpton.
+
+"Well, it's somewhat of a surprise to me," the lawyer admitted.
+
+"And I don't think you put it fairly," his friend contended. "I never
+can tell when you are serious, but this is damned serious. In business
+we have to deal with crooks, who hold us up right and left, and if we
+stood back you know as well as I do that everything would go to pot. And
+if we let the reformers have their way the country would be bedlam. We'd
+have anarchy and bloodshed, revolution, and the people would be calling
+us, the strong men, back in no time. You can't change human nature.
+And we have a sense of responsibility--we support law and order and the
+Church, and found institutions, and give millions away in charity."
+
+The big lawyer listened to this somewhat fervent defence of his order
+with an amused smile, nodding his head slightly from side to side.
+
+"If you don't believe in it," demanded Mr. Plimpton, "why the deuce don't
+you drop it?"
+
+"It's because of my loyalty," said Langmaid. "I wouldn't desert my pals.
+I couldn't bear, Wallis, to see you go to the guillotine without me."
+
+Mr. Plimpton became unpleasantly silent.
+
+"Well, you may think it's a joke," he resumed, after a moment, "but
+there will be a guillotine if we don't look out. That confounded parson
+is getting ready to spring something, and I'm going to give Mr. Parr a
+tip. He'll know how to handle him. He doesn't talk much, but I've got an
+idea, from one or two things he let drop, that he's a little suspicious
+of a change in Hodder. But he ought to be waived."
+
+"You're in no condition to talk to Mr. Parr, or to anyone else, except
+your wife, Walks," Langmaid said. "You'd better go home, and let me see
+Mr. Parr. I'm responsible for Mr. Hodder, anyway."
+
+"All right," Mr. Plimpton agreed, as though he had gained some shred of
+comfort from this thought. "I guess you're in worse than any of us."
+
+
+
+
+Volume 6.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX. THE ARRAIGNMENT
+
+
+I
+
+Looking backward, Hodder perceived that he had really come to the
+momentous decision of remaining at St. John's in the twilight of an
+evening when, on returning home from seeing Kate Marcy at Mr. Bentley's
+he had entered the darkening church. It was then that his mission
+had appeared to him as a vision. Every day, afterward, his sense and
+knowledge of this mission had grown stronger.
+
+To his mind, not the least of the trials it was to impose upon him, and
+one which would have to be dealt with shortly, was a necessary talk with
+his assistant, McCrae. If their relationship had from the beginning been
+unusual and unsatisfactory, adjectives would seem to defy what it had
+become during the summer. What did McCrae think of him? For Hodder
+had, it will be recalled, bidden his assistant good-by--and then had
+remained. At another brief interview, during which McCrae had betrayed
+no surprise, uttered no censure or comment, Hodder had announced
+his determination to remain in the city, and to take no part in the
+services. An announcement sufficiently astounding. During the months
+that followed, they had met, at rare intervals, exchanged casual
+greetings, and passed on. And yet Hodder had the feeling, more firmly
+planted than ever, that McCrae was awaiting, with an interest which
+might be called suspense, the culmination of the process going on within
+him.
+
+Well, now that he had worked it out, now that he had reached his
+decision, it was incumbent upon him to tell his assistant what that
+decision was. Hodder shrank from it as from an ordeal. His affection
+for the man, his admiration for McCrae's faithful, untiring, and
+unrecognized services had deepened. He had a theory that McCrae
+really liked him--would even sympathize with his solution; yet he
+procrastinated. He was afraid to put his theory to the test. It was not
+that Hodder feared that his own solution was not the right one, but that
+McCrae might not find it so: he was intensely concerned that it should
+also be McCrae's solution--the answer, if one liked, to McCrae's mute
+and eternal questionings. He wished to have it a fruition for McCrae as
+well as for himself; since theoretically, at least, he had pierced the
+hard crust of his assistant's exterior, and conceived him beneath to be
+all suppressed fire. In short, Hodder wished to go into battle side by
+side with McCrae. Therein lay his anxiety.
+
+Another consideration troubled him--McCrae's family, dependent on a
+rather meagre salary. His assistant, in sustaining him in the struggle
+he meant to enter, would be making even a greater sacrifice than
+himself. For Hodder had no illusions, and knew that the odds against
+him were incalculable. Whatever, if defeated, his own future might be,
+McCrae's was still more problematical and tragic.
+
+The situation, when it came, was even more difficult than Hodder
+had imagined it, since McCrae was not a man to oil the wheels of
+conversation. In silence he followed the rector up the stairs and into
+his study, in silence he took the seat at the opposite side of the
+table. And Hodder, as he hesitated over his opening, contemplated in no
+little perplexity and travail the gaunt and non-committal face before
+him:
+
+"McCrae," he began at length, "you must have thought my conduct this
+summer most peculiar. I wish to thank you, first of all, for the
+consideration you have shown me, and to tell you how deeply I appreciate
+your taking the entire burden of the work of the parish."
+
+McCrae shook his head vigorously, but did not speak.
+
+"I owe it to you to give you some clew to what happened to me," the
+rector continued, "although I have an idea that you do not need much
+enlightenment on this matter. I have a feeling that you have somehow
+been aware of my discouragement during the past year or so, and of the
+causes of it. You yourself hold ideals concerning the Church which you
+have not confided to me. Of this I am sure. I came here to St. John's
+full of hope and confidence, gradually to lose both, gradually to
+realise that there was something wrong with me, that in spite of all
+my efforts I was unable to make any headway in the right direction. I
+became perplexed, dissatisfied--the results were so meagre, so out of
+proportion to the labour. And the very fact that those who may be called
+our chief parishioners had no complaint merely added to my uneasiness.
+That kind of success didn't satisfy me, and I venture to assume it
+didn't satisfy you."
+
+Still McCrae made no sign.
+
+"Finally I came to what may be termed a double conclusion. In the first
+place, I began to see more and more clearly that our modern civilization
+is at fault, to perceive how completely it is conducted on the
+materialistic theory of the survival of the fittest rather than that of
+the brotherhood of man, and that those who mainly support this church
+are, consciously or not, using it as a bulwark for the privilege they
+have gained at the expense of their fellow-citizens. And my conclusion
+was that Christianity must contain some vital germ which I had somehow
+missed, and which I must find if I could, and preach and release it.
+That it was the release of this germ these people feared unconsciously.
+I say to you, at the risk of the accusation of conceit, that I believed
+myself to have a power in the pulpit if I could only discover the
+truth."
+
+Hodder thought he detected, as he spoke these words, a certain
+relaxation of the tension.
+
+"For a while, as the result of discouragement, of cowardice, I may
+say, of the tearing-down process of the theological structure--built of
+debris from many ruins on which my conception of Christianity rested,
+I lost all faith. For many weeks I did not enter the church, as you
+yourself must know. Then, when I had given up all hope, through certain
+incidents and certain persona, a process of reconstruction began. In
+short, through no virtue which I can claim as my own, I believe I have
+arrived at the threshold of an understanding of Christianity as our Lord
+taught it and lived it. And I intend to take the pulpit and begin to
+preach it.
+
+"I am deeply concerned in regard to yourself as to what effect my course
+may have on you. And I am not you to listen to me with a view that you
+should see your way clear to support me McCrae, but rather that you
+should be fully apprised of my new belief and intentions. I owe this
+to you, for your loyal support in the pest. I shall go over with you,
+later, if you care to listen, my whole position. It may be called the
+extreme Protestant position, and I use protestant, for want of a better
+word, to express what I believe is Paul's true as distinguished from the
+false of his two inconsistent theologies. It was this doctrine of Paul's
+of redemption by faith, of reacting grace by an inevitable spiritual
+law--of rebirth, if you will--that Luther and the Protestant reformers
+revived and recognized, rightly, as the vital element of Christ's
+teachings, although they did not succeed in separating it wholly
+from the dross which clung to it. It is the leaven which has changed
+governments, and which in the end, I am firmly convinced, will make true
+democracy inevitable. And those who oppose democracy inherently dread
+its workings.
+
+"I do not know your views, but it is only fair to add at this time that
+I no longer believe in the external and imposed authority of the Church
+in the sense in which I formerly accepted it, nor in the virgin birth,
+nor in certain other dogmas in which I once acquiesced. Other clergymen
+of our communion have proclaimed, in speech and writing, their disbelief
+in these things. I have satisfied my conscience as they have, and I mean
+to make no secret of my change. I am convinced that not one man or woman
+in ten thousand to-day who has rejected Christianity ever knew
+what Christianity is. The science and archaic philosophy in which
+Christianity has been swaddled and hampered is discredited, and the
+conclusion is drawn that Christianity itself must be discredited."
+
+"Ye're going to preach all this?" McCrae demanded, almost fiercely.
+
+"Yes," Hodder replied, still uncertain as to his assistant's attitude,
+"and more. I have fully reflected, and I am willing to accept all the
+consequences. I understand perfectly, McCrae, that the promulgation
+alone of the liberal orthodoxy of which I have spoken will bring me into
+conflict with the majority of the vestry and the congregation, and that
+the bishop will be appealed to. They will say, in effect, that I have
+cheated them, that they hired one man and that another has turned up,
+whom they never would have hired. But that won't be the whole story. If
+it were merely a question of doctrine, I should resign. It's deeper than
+that, more sinister." Hodder doubled up his hand, and laid it on the
+table. "It's a matter," he said, looking into McCrae's eyes, "of freeing
+this church from those who now hold it in chains. And the two questions,
+I see clearly now, the doctrinal and the economic, are so interwoven as
+to be inseparable. My former, ancient presentation of Christianity left
+men and women cold. It did not draw them into this church and send them
+out again fired with the determination to bring religion into everyday
+life, resolved to do their part in the removal of the injustices and
+cruelties with which we are surrounded, to bring Christianity into
+government, where it belongs. Don't misunderstand me I'm not going to
+preach politics, but religion."
+
+"I don't misunderstand ye," answered McCrae. He leaned a little forward,
+staring at the rector from behind his steel spectacles with a glance
+which had become piercing.
+
+"And I am going to discourage a charity which is a mockery of
+Christianity," Hodder went on, "the spectacle of which turns thousands
+of men and women in sickening revolt against the Church of Christ
+to-day. I have discovered, at last, how some of these persons have made
+their money, and are making it. And I am going to let them know, since
+they have repudiated God in their own souls, since they have denied the
+Christian principle of individual responsibility, that I, as the vicar
+of God, will not be a party to the transaction of using the Church as a
+means of doling out ill-gotten gains to the poor."
+
+"Mr. Parr!" McCrae exclaimed.
+
+"Yes," said the rector, slowly, and with a touch of sadness, "since you
+have mentioned him, Mr. Parr. But I need not say that this must go no
+farther. I am in possession of definite facts in regard to Mr. Parr
+which I shall present to him when he returns."
+
+"Ye'll tell him to his face?"
+
+"It is the only way."
+
+McCrae had risen. A remarkable transformation had come over the man,--he
+was reminiscent, at that moment, of some Covenanter ancestor going into
+battle. And his voice shook with excitement.
+
+"Ye may count on me, Mr. Hodder," he cried. "These many years I've
+waited, these many years I've seen what ye see now, but I was not the
+man. Aye, I've watched ye, since the day ye first set foot in this
+church. I knew what was going on inside of ye, because it was just that
+I felt myself. I hoped--I prayed ye might come to it."
+
+The sight of this taciturn Scotchman, moved in this way, had an
+extraordinary effect on Hodder himself, and his own emotion was so
+inexpressibly stirred that he kept silence a moment to control it.
+This proof of the truth of his theory in regard to McCrae he found
+overwhelming.
+
+"But you said nothing, McCrae," he began presently. "I felt all along
+that you knew what was wrong--if you had only spoken."
+
+"I could not," said McCrae. "I give ye my word I tried, but I just could
+not. Many's the time I wanted to--but I said to myself, when I looked at
+you, 'wait, it will come, much better than ye can say it.' And ye have
+made me see more than I saw, Mr. Hodder,--already ye have. Ye've got
+the whole thing in ye're eye, and I only had a part of it. It's because
+ye're the bigger man of the two."
+
+"You thought I'd come to it?" demanded Hodder, as though the full force
+of this insight had just struck him.
+
+"Well," said McCrae, "I hoped. It seemed, to look at ye, ye'r true
+nature--what was by rights inside of ye. That's the best explaining I
+can do. And I call to mind that time ye spoke about not making the men
+in the classes Christians--that was what started me to thinking."
+
+"And you asked me," returned the rector, "how welcome some of them would
+be in Mr. Parr's Pew."
+
+"Ah, it worried me," declared the assistant, with characteristic
+frankness, "to see how deep ye were getting in with him."
+
+Hodder did not reply to this. He had himself risen, and stood looking at
+McCrae, filled with a new thought.
+
+"There is one thing I should like to say to you--which is very
+difficult, McCrae, but I have no doubt you see the matter as clearly as
+I do. In making this fight, I have no one but myself to consider. I am a
+single man--"
+
+"Yell not need to go on," answered McCrae, with an odd mixture of
+sternness and gentleness in his voice. "I'll stand and fall with ye, Mr.
+Hodder. Before I ever thought of the Church I learned a trade, as a boy
+in Scotland. I'm not a bad carpenter. And if worse comes to worse, I've
+an idea I can make as much with my hands as I make in the ministry."
+
+The smile they exchanged across the table sealed the compact between
+them.
+
+
+
+II
+
+The electric car which carried him to his appointment with the financier
+shot westward like a meteor through the night. And now that the hour was
+actually at hand, it seemed to Hodder that he was absurdly unprepared to
+meet it. New and formidable aspects, hitherto unthought of, rose in his
+mind, and the figure of Eldon Parr loomed to Brobdingnagian proportions
+as he approached it. In spite of his determination, the life-blood of
+his confidence ebbed, a sense of the power and might of the man who had
+now become his adversary increased; and that apprehension of the impact
+of the great banker's personality, the cutting edge with the vast
+achievements wedged in behind it, each adding weight and impetus to its
+momentum the apprehension he had felt in less degree on the day of the
+first meeting, and which had almost immediately evaporated--surged up
+in him now. His fear was lest the charged atmosphere of the banker's
+presence might deflect his own hitherto clear perception of true worth.
+He dreaded, once in the midst of those disturbing currents, a bungling
+presentation of the cause which inspired him, and which he knew to be
+righteousness itself.
+
+Suddenly his mood shifted, betraying still another weakness, and he
+saw Eldon Parr, suddenly, vividly--more vividly, indeed, than ever
+before--in the shades of the hell of his loneliness. And pity welled
+up, drowning the image of incarnate greed and selfishness and lust for
+wealth and power: The unique pathos of his former relationship with
+the man reasserted itself, and Hodder was conscious once more of the
+dependence which Eldon Parr had had on his friendship. During that
+friendship he, Hodder, had never lost the sense of being the stronger
+of the two, of being leaned upon: leaned upon by a man whom the world
+feared and hated, and whom he had been enable to regard with anything
+but compassion and the unquestionable affection which sprang from it.
+Appalled by this transition, he alighted from the car, and stood for a
+moment alone in the darkness gazing at the great white houses that rose
+above the dusky outline of shrubbery and trees.
+
+At any rate, he wouldn't find that sense of dependence to-night. And it
+steeled him somewhat to think, as he resumed his steps, that he would
+meet now the other side, the hard side hitherto always turned away. Had
+he needed no other warning of this, the answer to his note asking for
+an appointment would have been enough,--a brief and formal communication
+signed by the banker's secretary...
+
+"Mr. Parr is engaged just at present, sir," said the servant who opened
+the door. "Would you be good enough to step into the library?"
+
+Hardly had he entered the room when he heard a sound behind him, and
+turned to confront Alison. The thought of her, too, had complicated
+infinitely his emotions concerning the interview before him, and the
+sight of her now, of her mature beauty displayed in evening dress, of
+her white throat gleaming whiter against the severe black of her gown,
+made him literally speechless. Never had he accused her of boldness, and
+now least of all. It was the quality of her splendid courage that
+was borne in upon him once more above the host of other feelings and
+impressions, for he read in her eyes a knowledge of the meaning of his
+visit.
+
+They stood facing each other an appreciable moment.
+
+"Mr. Langmaid is with him now," she said, in a low voice.
+
+"Yes," he answered.
+
+Her eyes still rested on his face, questioningly, appraisingly, as
+though she were seeking to estimate his preparedness for the
+ordeal before him, his ability to go through with it successfully,
+triumphantly. And in her mention of Langmaid he recognized that she had
+meant to sound a note of warning. She had intimated a consultation of
+the captains, a council of war. And yet he had never spoken to her of
+this visit. This proof of her partisanship, that she had come to him at
+the crucial instant, overwhelmed him.
+
+"You know why I am here?" he managed to say. It had to do with the
+extent of her knowledge.
+
+"Oh, why shouldn't I?" she cried, "after what you have told me. And
+could you think I didn't understand, from the beginning, that it meant
+this?"
+
+His agitation still hampered him. He made a gesture of assent.
+
+"It was inevitable," he said.
+
+"Yes, it' was inevitable," she assented, and walked slowly to the
+mantel, resting her hand on it and bending her head. "I felt that you
+would not shirk it, and yet I realize how painful it must be to you."
+
+"And to you," he replied quickly.
+
+"Yes, and to me. I do not know what you know, specifically,--I have
+never sought to find out things, in detail. That would be horrid. But
+I understand--in general--I have understood for many years." She raised
+her head, and flashed him a glance that was between a quivering smile
+and tears. "And I know that you have certain specific information."
+
+He could only wonder at her intuition.
+
+"So far as I am concerned, it is not for the world," he answered.
+
+"Oh, I appreciate that in you!" she exclaimed. "I wished you to know
+it. I wished you to know," she added, a little unsteadily, "how much
+I admire you for what you are doing. They are afraid of you--they will
+crush you if they can."
+
+He did not reply.
+
+"But you are going to speak the truth," she continued, her voice low and
+vibrating, "that is splendid! It must have its effect, no matter what
+happens."
+
+"Do you feel that?" he asked, taking a step toward her.
+
+"Yes. When I see you, I feel it, I think."...
+
+Whatever answer he might have made to this was frustrated by the
+appearance of the figure of Nelson Langmaid in the doorway. He seemed to
+survey them benevolently through his spectacles.
+
+"How are you, Hodder? Well, Alison, I have to leave without seeing
+anything of you--you must induce your father not to bring his business
+home with him. Just a word," he added to the rector, "before you go up."
+
+Hodder turned to Alison. "Good night," he said.
+
+The gentle but unmistakable pressure of her hand he interpreted as
+the pinning on him of the badge of her faith. He was to go into battle
+wearing her colours. Their eyes met.
+
+"Good night," she answered....
+
+In the hall the lawyer took his arm.
+
+"What's the trouble, Hodder?" he asked, sympathetically.
+
+Hodder, although on his guard, was somewhat taken aback by the
+directness of the onslaught.
+
+"I'm afraid, Mr. Langmaid," the rector replied, "that it would take me
+longer to tell you than the time at your disposal."
+
+"Dear me," said the lawyer, "this is too bad. Why didn't you come to
+me? I am a good friend of yours, Hodder, and there is an additional bond
+between us on my sister's account. She is extremely fond of you, you
+know. And I have a certain feeling of responsibility for you,--I brought
+you here."
+
+"You have always been very kind, and I appreciate it," Hodder replied.
+"I should be sorry to cause you any worry or annoyance. But you must
+understand that I cannot share the responsibility of my acts with any
+one."
+
+"A little advice from an old legal head is sometimes not out of place.
+Even Dr. Gilman used to consult me. I hope you will bear in mind how
+remarkably well you have been getting along at St. John's, and what a
+success you've made."
+
+"Success!" echoed the rector.
+
+Either Mr. Langmaid read nothing in his face, or was determined to read
+nothing.
+
+"Assuredly," he answered, benignly. "You have managed to please
+everybody, Mr. Parr included,--and some of us are not easy to please.
+I thought I'd tell you this, as a friend, as your first friend in the
+parish. Your achievement has been all the more remarkable, following, as
+you did, Dr. Gilman. Now it would greatly distress me to see that state
+of things disturbed, both for your sake and others. I thought I would
+just give you a hint, as you are going to see Mr. Parr, that he is in
+rather a nervous state. These so-called political reformers have upset
+the market and started a lot of legal complications that's why I'm here
+to-night. Go easy with him. I know you won't do anything foolish."
+
+The lawyer accompanied this statement with a pat, but this time he did
+not succeed in concealing his concern.
+
+"That depends on one's point of view," Hodder returned, with a smile. "I
+do not know how you have come to suspect that I am going to disturb Mr.
+Parr, but what I have to say to him is between him and me."
+
+Langmaid took up his hat from the table, and sighed.
+
+"Drop in on me sometime," he said, "I'd like to talk to you--Hodder
+heard a voice behind him, and turned. A servant was standing there.
+
+"Mr. Parr is ready to see you, sir," he said.
+
+The rector followed him up the stairs, to the room on the second floor,
+half office, half study, where the capitalist transacted his business
+when at home.
+
+
+
+III
+
+Eldon Parr was huddled over his desk reading a typewritten document; but
+he rose, and held out his hand, which Hodder took.
+
+"How are you, Mr. Hodder? I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, but
+matters of some legal importance have arisen on which I was obliged to
+make a decision. You're well, I hope." He shot a glance at the rector,
+and sat down again, still holding the sheets. "If you will excuse me a
+moment longer, I'll finish this."
+
+"Certainly," Hodder replied.
+
+"Take a chair," said Mr. Parr, "you'll find the evening paper beside
+you."
+
+Hodder sat down, and the banker resumed his perusal of the document, his
+eye running rapidly over the pages, pausing once in a while to scratch
+out a word or to make a note on the margin. In the concentration of the
+man on the task before him the rector read a design, an implication that
+the affairs of the Church were of a minor importance: sensed, indeed,
+the new attitude of hostility, gazed upon the undiscovered side, the
+dangerous side before which other men had quailed. Alison's words
+recurred to him, "they are afraid of you, they will crush you if they
+can." Eldon Parr betrayed, at any rate, no sign of fear. If his mental
+posture were further analyzed, it might be made out to contain an
+intimation that the rector, by some act, had forfeited the right to the
+unique privilege of the old relationship.
+
+Well, the fact that the banker had, in some apparently occult manner,
+been warned, would make Hodder's task easier--or rather less difficult.
+His feelings were even more complicated than he had anticipated. The
+moments of suspense were trying to his nerves, and he had a shrewd
+notion that this making men wait was a favourite manoeuvre of Eldon
+Parr's; nor had he underrated the benumbing force of that personality.
+It was evident that the financier intended him to open the battle,
+and he was--as he had expected--finding it difficult to marshal the
+regiments of his arguments. In vain he thought of the tragedy of
+Garvin.... The thing was more complicated. And behind this redoubtable
+and sinister Eldon Parr he saw, as it were, the wraith of that: other
+who had once confessed the misery of his loneliness....
+
+At last the banker rang, sharply, the bell on his desk. A secretary
+entered, to whom he dictated a telegram which contained these words:
+"Langmaid has discovered a way out." It was to be sent to an address
+in Texas. Then he turned in his chair and crossed his knees, his hand
+fondling an ivory paper-cutter. He smiled a little.
+
+"Well, Mr. Hodder," he said.
+
+The rector, intensely on his guard, merely inclined his head in
+recognition that his turn had come.
+
+"I was sorry," the banker continued, after a perceptible pause,--"that
+you could not see your way clear to have come with me on the cruise."
+
+"I must thank you again," Hodder answered, "but I felt--as I wrote
+you--that certain matters made it impossible for me to go."
+
+"I suppose you had your reasons, but I think you would have enjoyed the
+trip. I had a good, seaworthy boat--I chartered her from Mr. Lieber, the
+president of the Continental Zinc, you know. I went as far as Labrador.
+A wonderful coast, Mr. Hodder."
+
+"It must be," agreed the rector. It was clear that Mr. Parr intended to
+throw upon him the onus of the first move. There was a silence, brief,
+indeed, but long enough for Hodder to feel more and more distinctly the
+granite hardness which the other had become, to experience a rising,
+reenforcing anger. He went forward, steadily but resolutely, on the
+crest of it. "I have remained in the city," he continued, "and I have
+had the opportunity to discover certain facts of which I have hitherto
+been ignorant, and which, in my opinion, profoundly affect the welfare
+of the church. It is of these I wished to speak to you."
+
+Mr. Parr waited.
+
+"It is not much of an exaggeration to say that ever since I came here
+I have been aware that St. John's, considering the long standing of the
+parish, the situation of the church in a thickly populated district, is
+not fulfilling its mission. But I have failed until now to perceive the
+causes of that inefficiency."
+
+"Inefficiency?" The banker repeated the word.
+
+"Inefficiency," said Hodder. "The reproach, the responsibility is
+largely mine, as the rector, the spiritual, head of the parish. I
+believe I am right when I say that the reason for the decision, some
+twenty years ago, to leave the church where it is, instead of selling
+the property and building in the West End, was that it might minister
+to the poor in the neighbourhood, to bring religion and hope into their
+lives, and to exert its influence towards eradicating the vice and
+misery which surround it."
+
+"But I thought you had agreed," said Mr. Parr, coldly, "that we were to
+provide for that in the new chapel and settlement house."
+
+"For reasons which I hope to make plain to you, Mr. Parr," Hodder
+replied, "those people can never be reached, as they ought to be
+reached, by building that settlement house. The principle is wrong,
+the day is past when such things can be done--in that way." He laid
+an emphasis on these words. "It is good, I grant you, to care for the
+babies and children of the poor, it is good to get young women and men
+out of the dance-halls, to provide innocent amusement, distraction,
+instruction. But it is not enough. It leaves the great, transforming
+thing in the lives of these people untouched, and it will forever
+remain untouched so long as a sense of wrong, a continually deepening
+impression of an unchristian civilization upheld by the Church herself,
+exists. Such an undertaking as that settlement house--I see clearly
+now--is a palliation, a poultice applied to one of many sores, a
+compromise unworthy of the high mission of the Church. She should go to
+the root of the disease. It is her first business to make Christians,
+who, by amending their own lives, by going out individually and
+collectively into the life of the nation, will gradually remove these
+conditions."
+
+Mr. Parr sat drumming on the table. Hodder met his look.
+
+"So you, too, have come to it," he said.
+
+"Have come to what?"
+
+"Socialism."
+
+Hodder, in the state of clairvoyance in which he now surprisingly found
+himself, accurately summed up the value and meaning of the banker's
+sigh.
+
+"Say, rather," he replied, "that I have come to Christianity. We
+shall never have what is called socialism until there is no longer
+any necessity for it, until men, of their owe free will, are ready to
+renounce selfish, personal ambition and power and work for humanity, for
+the state."
+
+Mr. Parr's gesture implied that he cared not by what name the thing was
+called, but he still appeared strangely, astonishingly calm;--Hodder,
+with all his faculties acute, apprehended that he was dangerously calm.
+The man who had formerly been his friend was now completely obliterated,
+and he had the feeling almost of being about to grapple, in mortal
+combat, with some unknown monster whose tactics and resources were
+infinite, whose victims had never escaped. The monster was in Eldon
+Parr--that is how it came to him. The waxy, relentless demon was
+aroused. It behooved him, Hodder, to step carefully....
+
+"That is all very fine, Mr. Hodder, very altruistic, very Christian,
+I've no doubt-but the world doesn't work that way." (These were the
+words borne in on Hodder's consciousness.) "What drives the world is the
+motive furnished by the right of acquiring and holding property. If we
+had a division to-day, the able men would come out on top next year."
+
+The rector shook his head. He remembered, at that moment, Horace
+Bentley.
+
+"What drives the world is a far higher motive, Mr. Parr, the motive
+with which have been fired the great lights of history, the motive of
+renunciation and service which is transforming governments, which is
+gradually making the world a better place in which to live. And we are
+seeing men and women imbued with it, rising in ever increasing numbers
+on every side to-day."
+
+"Service!" Eldon Parr had seized upon the word as it passed and held it.
+"What do you think my life has been? I suppose," he said, with a touch
+of intense bitterness, "that you, too, who six months ago seemed
+as reasonable a man as I ever met, have joined in the chorus of
+denunciators. It has become the fashion to-day, thanks to your
+socialists, reformers, and agitators, to decry a man because he is rich,
+to take it for granted that he is a thief and a scoundrel, that he
+has no sense of responsibility for his country and his fellow-men. The
+glory, the true democracy of this nation, lies in its equal opportunity
+for all. They take no account of that, of the fact that each has had the
+same chance as his fellows. No, but they cry out that the man who, by
+the sweat of his brow, has earned wealth ought to divide it up with the
+lazy and the self-indulgent and the shiftless.
+
+"Take my case, for instance,--it is typical of thousands. I came to this
+city as a boy in my teens, with eight dollars in my pocket which I had
+earned on a farm. I swept the floor, cleaned the steps, moved boxes
+and ran errands in Gabriel Parker's store on Third Street. I was
+industrious, sober, willing to do anything. I fought, I tell you every
+inch of my way. As soon as I saved a little money I learned to use every
+ounce of brain I possessed to hold on to it. I trusted a man once, and
+I had to begin all over again. And I discovered, once for all, if a man
+doesn't look out for himself, no one will.
+
+"I don't pretend that I am any better than any one else, I have had to
+take life as I found it, and make the best of it. I conformed to the
+rules of the game; I soon had sense enough knocked into me to understand
+that the conditions were not of my making. But I'll say this for
+myself," Eldon Parr leaned forward over the blotter, "I had standards,
+and I stuck by them. I wanted to be a decent citizen, to bring up my
+children in the right way. I didn't squander my money, when I got it,
+on wine and women, I respected other men's wives, I supported the Church
+and the institutions of the city. I too even I had my ambitions, my
+ideals--and they were not entirely worldly ones. You would probably
+accuse me of wishing to acquire only the position of power which I hold.
+If you had accepted my invitation to go aboard the yacht this summer, it
+was my intention to unfold to you a scheme of charities which has long
+been forming in my mind, and which I think would be of no small benefit
+to the city where I have made my fortune. I merely mention this to prove
+to you that I am not unmindful, in spite of the circumstances of my
+own life, of the unfortunates whose mental equipment is not equal to my
+own."
+
+By this "poor boy" argument which--if Hodder had known--Mr. Parr had
+used at banquets with telling effect, the banker seemed to regain
+perspective and equilibrium, to plant his feet once more on the rock
+of the justification of his life, and from which, by a somewhat
+extraordinary process he had not quite understood, he had been partially
+shaken off. As he had proceeded with his personal history, his manner
+had gradually become one of the finality of experience over theory,
+of the forbearance of the practical man with the visionary. Like most
+successful citizens of his type, he possessed in a high degree
+the faculty of creating sympathy, of compelling others to
+accept--temporarily, at least--his point of view. It was this faculty,
+Hodder perceived, which had heretofore laid an enchantment upon him,
+and it was not without a certain wonder that he now felt himself to be
+released from the spell.
+
+The perceptions of the banker were as keen, and his sense of security
+was brief. Somehow, as he met the searching eye of the rector, he
+was unable to see the man as a visionary, but beheld--and, to do him
+justice--felt a twinge of respect for an adversary worthy of his steel.
+
+He, who was accustomed to prepare for clouds when they were mere specks
+on his horizon, paused even now to marvel why he had not dealt with
+this. Here was a man--a fanatic, if he liked--but still a man who
+positively did not fear him, to whom his wrath and power were as
+nothing! A new and startling and complicated sensation--but Eldon Parr
+was no coward. If he had, consciously or unconsciously, formerly looked
+upon the clergyman as a dependent, Hodder appeared to be one no more.
+The very ruggedness of the man had enhanced, expanded--as it were--until
+it filled the room. And Hodder had, with an audacity unparalleled in the
+banker's experience arraigned by implication his whole life, managed to
+put him on the defensive.
+
+"But if that be your experience," the rector said, "and it has become
+your philosophy, what is it in you that impels you to give these large
+sums for the public good?"
+
+"I should suppose that you, as a clergyman, might understand that my
+motive is a Christian one."
+
+Hodder sat very still, but a higher light came into his eyes.
+
+"Mr. Parr," he replied, "I have been a friend of yours, and I am a
+friend still. And what I am going to tell you is not only in the hope
+that others may benefit, but that your own soul may be saved. I mean
+that literally--your own soul. You are under the impression that you are
+a Christian, but you are not and never have been one. And you will
+not be one until your whole life is transformed, until you become a
+different man. If you do not change, it is my duty to warn you that the
+sorrow and suffering, the uneasiness which you now know, and which drive
+you on, in search of distraction, to adding useless sums of money to
+your fortune--this suffering, I say, will become intensified. You will
+die in the knowledge of it, and live on after, in the knowledge of it."
+
+In spite of himself, the financier drew back before this unexpected
+blast, the very intensity of which had struck a chill of terror in his
+inmost being. He had been taken off his guard,--for he had supposed the
+day long past--if it had ever existed--when a spiritual rebuke would
+upset him; the day long past when a minister could pronounce one with
+any force. That the Church should ever again presume to take herself
+seriously had never occurred to him. And yet--the man had denounced
+him in a moment of depression, of nervous irritation and exasperation
+against a government which had begun to interfere with the sacred
+liberty of its citizens, against political agitators who had spurred
+that government on. The world was mad. No element, it seemed, was now
+content to remain in its proper place. His voice, as he answered, shook
+with rage,--all the greater because the undaunted sternness by which it
+was confronted seemed to reduce it to futility.
+
+"Take care!" he cried, "take care! You, nor any other man, clergyman or
+no clergyman, have any right to be the judge of my conduct."
+
+"On the contrary," said Holder, "if your conduct affects the welfare,
+the progress, the reputation of the church of which I am rector, I have
+the right. And I intend to exercise it. It becomes my duty, however
+painful, to tell you, as a member of the Church, wherein you have
+wronged the Church and wronged yourself."
+
+He didn't raise his tone, and there was in it more of sorrow than of
+indignation. The banker turned an ashen gray.. A moment elapsed before
+he spoke, a transforming moment. He suddenly became ice.
+
+"Very well," he said. "I can't pretend to account for these astounding
+views you have acquired--and I am using a mild term. Let me say this:
+(he leaned forward a little, across the desk) I demand that you be
+specific. I am a busy man, I have little time to waste, I have certain
+matters--before me which must be attended to to-night. I warn you that I
+will not listen any longer to vague accusations."
+
+It was Holder's turn to marvel. Did Eldon Purr, after all; have no sense
+of guilt? Instantaneously, automatically, his own anger rose.
+
+"You may be sure, Mr. Parr, that I should not be here unless I were
+prepared to be specific. And what I am going to say to you I have
+reserved for your ear alone, in the hope that you will take it to heart,
+while it is not yet too late, said amend your life accordingly."
+
+Eldon Parr shifted slightly. His look became inscrutable, was riveted on
+the rector.
+
+"I shall call your attention first to a man of whom you have probably
+never heard. He is dead now--he threw himself into the river this
+summer, with a curse on his lips--I am afraid--a curse against you. A
+few years ago he lived happily with his wife and child in a little house
+on the Grade Suburban, and he had several thousand dollars as a result
+of careful saving and systematic self-denial.
+
+"Perhaps you have never thought of the responsibilities of a great name.
+This man, like thousands of others in the city, idealized you. He looked
+up to you as the soul of honour, as a self-made man who by his own
+unaided efforts--as you yourself have just pointed out--rose from a
+poor boy to a position of power and trust in the community. He saw you a
+prominent layman in the Church of God. He was dazzled by the
+brilliancy of your success, inspired by a civilization which--gave such
+opportunities. He recognized that he himself had not the brains for
+such an achievement,--his hope and love and ambition were centred in his
+boy."
+
+At the word Eldon Parr's glance was suddenly dulled by pain. He
+tightened his lips.
+
+"That boy was then of a happy, merry disposition, so the mother says,
+and every summer night as she cooked supper she used to hear him
+laughing as he romped in the yard with his father. When I first saw him
+this summer, it was two days before his father committed suicide. The
+child was lying, stifled with the heat, in the back room of one of those
+desolate lodging houses in Dalton Street, and his little body had almost
+wasted away.
+
+"While I was there the father came in, and when he saw me he was filled
+with fury. He despised the Church, and St. John's above all churches,
+because you were of it; because you who had given so generously to
+it had wrecked his life. You had shattered his faith in humanity,
+his ideal. From a normal, contented man he had deteriorated into a
+monomaniac whom no one would hire, a physical and mental wreck who
+needed care and nursing. He said he hoped the boy would die.
+
+"And what had happened? The man had bought, with all the money he had
+in the world, Consolidated Tractions. He had bought it solely because
+of his admiration for your ability, his faith in your name. It was
+inconceivable to him that a man of your standing, a public benefactor,
+a supporter of church and charities, would permit your name to be
+connected with any enterprise that was not sound and just. Thousands
+like Garvin lost all they had, while you are still a rich man. It is
+further asserted that you sold out all your stock at a high price, with
+the exception of that in the leased lines, which are guaranteed heavy
+dividends."
+
+"Have you finished?" demanded Eldon Parr.
+
+"Not quite, on this subject," replied the rector. "Two nights after
+that, the man threw himself in the river. His body was pulled out by men
+on a tugboat, and his worthless stock certificate was in his pocket. It
+is now in the possession of Mr. Horace Bentley. Thanks to Mr. Bentley,
+the widow found a temporary home, and the child has almost recovered."
+
+Hodder paused. His interest had suddenly become concentrated upon the
+banker's new demeanour, and he would not have thought it within the
+range of possibility that a man could listen to such a revelation
+concerning himself without the betrayal of some feeling. But so it
+was,--Eldon Parr had been coldly attentive, save for the one scarcely
+perceptible tremor when the boy was mentioned. His interrogatory gesture
+gave the very touch of perfection to this attitude, since it proclaimed
+him to have listened patiently to a charge so preposterous that a less
+reasonable man would have cut it short.
+
+"And what leads you to suppose," he inquired, "that I am responsible
+in this matter? What leads you to infer that the Consolidated Tractions
+Company was not organized in good faith? Do you think that business men
+are always infallible? The street-car lines of this city were at
+sixes and sevens, fighting each other; money was being wasted by poor
+management. The idea behind the company was a public-spirited one,
+to give the citizens cheaper and better service, by a more modern
+equipment, by a wider system of transfer. It seems to me, Mr. Hodder,
+that you put yourself in a more quixotic position than the so-called
+reformers when you assume that the men who organize a company in good
+faith are personally responsible for every share of stock that is sold,
+and for the welfare of every individual who may buy the stock. We force
+no one to buy it. They do so at their own risk. I myself have thousands
+of dollars of worthless stock in my safe. I have never complained."
+
+The full force of Hodder's indignation went into his reply.
+
+"I am not talking about the imperfect code of human justice under which
+we live, Mr. Parr," he cried. "This is not a case in which a court of
+law may exonerate you, it is between you and your God. But I have taken
+the trouble to find out, from unquestioned sources, the truth about
+the Consolidated Tractions Company--I shall not go into the details at
+length--they are doubtless familiar to you. I know that the legal genius
+of Mr. Langmaid, one of my vestry, made possible the organization of the
+company, and thereby evaded the plain spirit of the law of the state. I
+know that one branch line was bought for two hundred and fifty thousand
+dollars, and capitalized for three millions, and that most of the
+others were scandalously over-capitalized. I know that while the coming
+transaction was still a secret, you and other, gentlemen connected with
+the matter bought up large interests in other lines, which you proceeded
+to lease to yourselves at guaranteed dividends which these lines do not
+earn. I know that the first large dividend was paid out of capital. And
+the stock which you sold to poor Garvin was so hopelessly watered that
+it never could have been anything but worthless. If, in spite of these
+facts, you do not deem yourself responsible for the misery which has
+been caused, if your conscience is now clear, it is my duty to tell you
+that there is a higher bar of justice."
+
+The intensity of the fire of the denunciation had, indeed, a momentary
+yet visible effect in the banker's expression. Whatever the emotions
+thus lashed to self-betrayal, anger, hatred,--fear, perhaps, Hodder
+could not detect a trace of penitence; and he was aware, on the part of
+the other, of a supreme, almost spasmodic effort for self-control. The
+constitutional reluctance of Eldon Parr to fight openly could not have
+been more clearly demonstrated.
+
+"Because you are a clergyman, Mr. Hodder," he began, "because you are
+the rector of St. John's, I have allowed you to say things to me which
+I would not have permitted from any other man. I have tried to take
+into account your point of view, which is naturally restricted, your
+pardonable ignorance of what business men, who wish to do their duty by
+Church and State, have to contend with. When you came to this parish
+you seemed to have a sensible, a proportional view of things; you were
+content to confine your activities to your own sphere, content not to
+meddle with politics and business, which you could, at first hand, know
+nothing about. The modern desire of clergymen to interfere in these
+matters has ruined the usefulness of many of them.
+
+"I repeat, I have tried to be patient. I venture to hope, still, that
+this extraordinary change in you may not be permanent, but merely the
+result of a natural sympathy with the weak and unwise and unfortunate
+who are always to be found in a complex civilization. I can even
+conceive how such a discovery must have shocked you, temporarily aroused
+your indignation, as a clergyman, against the world as it is--and, I
+may add, as it has always been. My personal friendship for you, and my
+interest in your future welfare impel me to make a final appeal to you
+not to ruin a career which is full of promise."
+
+The rector did not take advantage of the pause. A purely psychological
+curiosity hypnotized him to see how far the banker would go in his
+apparent generosity.
+
+"I once heard you say, I believe, in a sermon, that the Christian
+religion is a leaven. It is the leaven that softens and ameliorates the
+hard conditions of life, that makes our relations with our fellow-men
+bearable. But life is a contest, it is war. It always has been, and
+always will be. Business is war, commerce is war, both among nations and
+individuals. You cannot get around it. If a man does not exterminate his
+rivals they will exterminate him. In other days churches were built and
+endowed with the spoils of war, and did not disdain the money. To-day
+they cheerfully accept the support and gifts of business men. I do
+not accuse them of hypocrisy. It is a recognition on their part that
+business men, in spite of hard facts, are not unmindful of the spiritual
+side of life, and are not deaf to the injunction to help others.
+And when, let me ask you, could you find in the world's history more
+splendid charities than are around us to-day? Institutions endowed
+for medical research, for the conquest of deadly diseases? libraries,
+hospitals, schools--men giving their fortunes for these things, the
+fruits of a life's work so laboriously acquired? Who can say that the
+modern capitalist is not liberal, is not a public benefactor?
+
+"I dislike being personal, but you have forced it upon me. I dislike
+to refer to what I have already done in the matter of charities, but
+I hinted to you awhile ago of a project I have conceived and almost
+perfected of gifts on a much larger scale than I have ever attempted."
+The financier stared at him meaningly. "And I had you in mind as one of
+the three men whom I should consult, whom I should associate with
+myself in the matter. We cannot change human nature, but we can better
+conditions by wise giving. I do not refer now to the settle ment house,
+which I am ready to help make and maintain as the best in the country,
+but I have in mind a system to be carried out with the consent and aid
+of the municipal government, of play-grounds, baths, parks, places of
+recreation, and hospitals, for the benefit of the people, which will
+put our city in the very forefront of progress. And I believe, as a
+practical man, I can convince you that the betterment which you and I
+so earnestly desire can be brought about in no other way. Agitation can
+only result in anarchy and misery for all."
+
+Hodder's wrath, as he rose from his chair, was of the sort that appears
+incredibly to add to the physical stature,--the bewildering spiritual
+wrath which is rare indeed, and carries all before it.
+
+"Don't tempt me, Mr. Parr!" he said. "Now that I know the truth, I tell
+you frankly I would face poverty and persecution rather than consent
+to your offer. And I warn you once more not to flatter yourself that
+existence ends here, that you will, not be called to answer for every
+wrong act you have committed in accumulating your fortune, that what you
+call business is an affair of which God takes no account. What I say
+may seem foolishness to you, but I tell you, in the words of that
+Foolishness, that it will not profit you to gain the whole world and
+lose your own soul. You remind me that the Church in old time accepted
+gifts from the spoils of war, and I will add of rapine and murder. And
+the Church to-day, to repeat your own parallel, grows rich with money
+wrongfully got. Legally? Ah, yes, legally, perhaps. But that will not
+avail you. And the kind of church you speak of--to which I, to my shame,
+once consented--Our Lord repudiates. It is none of his. I warn you, Mr.
+Parr, in his Name, first to make your peace with your brothers before
+you presume to lay another gift on the altar."
+
+During this withering condemnation of himself Eldon Parr sat motionless,
+his face grown livid, an expression on it that continued to haunt Hodder
+long afterwards. An expression, indeed, which made the banker almost
+unrecognizable.
+
+"Go," he whispered, his hand trembling visibly as he pointed towards the
+door. "Go--I have had enough of this."
+
+"Not until I have said one thing more," replied the rector, undaunted.
+"I have found the woman whose marriage with your son you prevented,
+whom you bought off and started on the road to hell without any sense
+of responsibility. You have made of her a prostitute and a drunkard.
+Whether she can be rescued or not is problematical. She, too, is in
+Mr. Bentley's care, a man upon whom you once showed no mercy. I leave
+Garvin, who has gone to his death, and Kate Marcy and Horace Bentley to
+your conscience, Mr. Parr. That they are representative of many others,
+I do not doubt. I tell you solemnly that the whole meaning of life is
+service to others, and I warn you, before it is too late, to repent and
+make amends. Gifts will not help you, and charities are of no avail."
+
+At the reference to Kate Marcy Eldon Parr's hand dropped to his side. He
+seemed to have physical difficulty in speaking.
+
+"Ah, you have found that woman!" He leaned an elbow on the desk, he
+seemed suddenly to have become weary, spent, old. And Hodder, as he
+watched him, perceived--that his haggard look was directed towards a
+photograph in a silver frame on the table--a photograph of Preston Parr.
+At length he broke the silence.
+
+"What would you have had me do?" he asked. "Permit my son to marry a
+woman of the streets, I suppose. That would have been Christianity,
+according to your notion. Come now, what world you have done, if your
+son had been in question?"
+
+A wave of pity swept over the rector.
+
+"Why," he said, why did you have nothing but cruelty in your heart, and
+contempt for her? When you saw that she was willing, for the love of the
+son whom you loved, to give up all that life meant to her, how could
+you destroy her without a qualm? The crime you committed was that you
+refused to see God in that woman's soul, when he had revealed himself to
+you. You looked for wile, for cunning, for self-seeking,--and they were
+not there. Love had obliterated them. When you saw how meekly she
+obeyed you, and agreed to go away, why did you not have pity? If you had
+listened to your conscience, you would have known what to do.
+
+"I do not say that you should not have opposed the marriage--then.
+Marriage is not to be lightly entered into. From the moment you went to
+see her you became responsible for her. You hurled her into the abyss,
+and she has come back to haunt you. You should have had her educated and
+cared for--she would have submitted, to any plan you proposed. And if,
+after a sensible separation, you became satisfied as to her character
+and development, and your son still wished to marry her, you should have
+withdrawn your objections.
+
+"As it is, and in consequence of your act, you have lost your son. He
+left you then, and you have no more control over him."
+
+"Stop!" cried Eldon Parr, "for God's sake stop! I won't stand any more
+of this. I will not listen to criticism of my life, to strictures on my
+conduct from you or any other man." He reached for a book on the corner
+of his desk--a cheque book.--"You'll want money for these people, I
+suppose," he added brutally. "I will give it, but it must be understood
+that I do not recognize any right of theirs to demand it."
+
+For a moment Holder did not trust himself to reply. He looked down
+across the desk at the financier, who was fumbling with the leaves.
+
+"They do not demand it, Mr. Parr," he answered, gently. "And I have
+tried to make it plain to you that you have lost the right to give it. I
+expected to fail in this. I have failed."
+
+"What do you mean?" Eldon Parr let the cheque book close.
+
+"I mean what I said," the rector replied. "That if you would save your
+soul you must put an end, to-morrow, to the acquisition of money, and
+devote the rest of your life to an earnest and sincere attempt to
+make just restitution to those you have wronged. And you must ask the
+forgiveness of God for your sins. Until you do that, your charities are
+abominations in his sight. I will not trouble you any longer, except to
+say that I shall be ready to come to you at any time my presence may be
+of any help to you."
+
+The banker did not speak.... With a single glance towards the library
+Holder left the house, but paused for a moment outside to gaze back at
+it, as it loomed in the darkness against the stars.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI. ALISON GOES TO CHURCH
+
+
+I
+
+On the following Sunday morning the early light filtered into Alison's
+room, and she opened her strong eyes. Presently she sprang from her bed
+and drew back the curtains of the windows, gazing rapturously into the
+crystal day. The verdure of the Park was freshened to an incredible
+brilliancy by the dew, a thin white veil of mist was spread over the
+mirror of the waters, the trees flung long shadows across the turf.
+
+A few minutes later she was out, thrilled by the silence, drawing in
+deep, breaths of the morning air; lingering by still lakes catching the
+blue of the sky--a blue that left its stain upon the soul; as the sun
+mounted she wandered farther, losing herself in the wilderness of the
+forest.
+
+At eight o'clock, when she returned, there were signs that the city had
+awakened. A mounted policeman trotted past her as she crossed a gravel
+drive, and on the tree-flecked stretches, which lately had been empty
+as Eden, human figures were scattered. A child, with a sailboat that
+languished for lack of wind, stared at her, first with fascination and
+wonder in his eyes, and then smiled at her tentatively. She returned the
+smile with a start.
+
+Children had stared at her like that before now, and for the first time
+in her life she asked herself what the look might mean. She had never
+really been fond of them: she had never, indeed, been brought much in
+contact with them. But now, without warning, a sudden fierce yearning
+took possession of her: surprised and almost frightened, she stopped
+irresistibly and looked back at the thin little figure crouched beside
+the water, to discover that his widened eyes were still upon her. Her
+own lingered on him shyly, and thus for a moment she hung in doubt
+whether to flee or stay, her heart throbbing as though she were on the
+brink of some unknown and momentous adventure. She took a timid step.
+
+"What's your name?" she asked.
+
+The boy told her.
+
+"What's yours?" he ventured, still under the charm.
+
+"Alison."
+
+He had never heard of that name, and said so. They deplored the lack of
+wind. And presently, still mystified, but gathering courage, he asked
+her why she blushed, at which her colour deepened.
+
+"I can't help it," she told him.
+
+"I like it," the boy said.
+
+Though the grass was still wet, she got down on her knees in her white
+skirt, the better to push the boat along the shore: once it drifted
+beyond their reach, and was only rescued by a fallen branch discovered
+with difficulty.
+
+The arrival of the boy's father, an anaemic-looking little man, put an
+end to their play. He deplored the condition of the lady's dress.
+
+"It doesn't matter in the least," she assured him, and fled in a mood
+she did not attempt to analyze. Hurrying homeward, she regained her
+room, bathed, and at half past eight appeared in the big, formal
+dining-room, from which the glare of the morning light was carefully
+screened. Her father insisted on breakfasting here; and she found him
+now seated before the white table-cloth, reading a newspaper. He glanced
+up at her critically.
+
+"So you've decided to honour me this morning," he said.
+
+"I've been out in the Park," she replied, taking the chair opposite
+him. He resumed his reading, but presently, as she was pouring out the
+coffee, he lowered the paper again.
+
+"What's the occasion to-day?" he asked.
+
+"The occasion?" she repeated, without acknowledging that she had
+instantly grasped his implication. His eyes were on her gown.
+
+"You are not accustomed, as a rule, to pay much deference to Sunday."
+
+"Doesn't the Bible say, somewhere," she inquired, "that the Sabbath was
+made for man? Perhaps that may be broadened after a while, to include
+woman."
+
+"But you have never been an advocate, so far as I know, of women taking
+advantage of their opportunity by going to Church."
+
+"What's the use," demanded Alison, "of the thousands of working women
+spending the best part of the day in the ordinary church, when their
+feet and hands and heads are aching? Unless some fire is kindled in
+their souls, it is hopeless for them to try to obtain any benefit from
+religion--so-called--as it is preached to them in most churches."
+
+"Fire in their souls!" exclaimed the banker.
+
+"Yes. If the churches offered those who might be leaders among their
+fellows a practical solution of existence, kindled their self-respect,
+replaced a life of drudgery by one of inspiration--that would be worth
+while. But you will never get such a condition as that unless your
+pulpits are filled by personalities, instead of puppets who are all cast
+in one mould, and who profess to be there by divine right."
+
+"I am glad to see at least that you are taking an interest in religious
+matters," her father observed, meaningly.
+
+Alison coloured. But she retorted with spirit.
+
+"That is true of a great many persons to-day who are thinking on the
+subject. If Christianity is a solution of life, people are demanding of
+the churches that they shall perform their function, and show us how,
+and why, or else cease to encumber the world."
+
+Eldon Parr folded up his newspaper.
+
+"So you are going to Church this morning," he said.
+
+"Yes. At what time will you be ready?"
+
+"At quarter to eleven. But if you are going to St. John', you will have
+to start earlier. I'll order a car at half past ten."
+
+"Where are you going?" She held her breath, unconsciously, for the
+answer.
+
+"To Calvary," he replied coldly, as he rose to leave the room. "But I
+hesitate to ask you to come,--I am afraid you will not find a religion
+there that suits you."
+
+For a moment she could not trust herself to speak. The secret which,
+ever since Friday evening, she had been burning to learn was disclosed
+... Her father had broken with Mr. Hodder!
+
+"Please don't order the motor for me," she said. "I'd rather go in the
+street cars."
+
+She sat very still in the empty room, her face burning.
+
+Characteristically, her father had not once mentioned the rector of
+St. John's, yet had contrived to imply that her interest in Hodder was
+greater than her interest in religion. And she was forced to admit, with
+her customary honesty, that the implication was true.
+
+
+The numbers who knew Alison Parr casually thought her cold. They admired
+a certain quality in her work, but they did not suspect that that
+quality was the incomplete expression of an innate idealism capable
+of being fanned into flame,--for she was subject to rare but ardent
+enthusiasms which kindled and transformed her incredibly in the eyes of
+the few to whom the process had been revealed. She had had even a longer
+list of suitors than any one guessed; men who--usually by accident--had
+touched the hidden spring, and suddenly beholding an unimagined woman,
+had consequently lost their heads. The mistake most of them had made
+(for subtlety in such affairs is not a masculine trait) was the failure
+to recognize and continue to present the quality in them which had
+awakened her. She had invariably discovered the feet of clay.
+
+Thus disillusion had been her misfortune--perhaps it would be more
+accurate to say her fortune. She had built up, after each invasion,
+her defences more carefully and solidly than before, only to be again
+astonished and dismayed by the next onslaught, until at length the
+question had become insistent--the question of an alliance for purposes
+of greater security. She had returned to her childhood home to consider
+it, frankly recognizing it as a compromise, a fall....
+
+And here, in this sanctuary of her reflection, and out of a quarter on
+which she had set no watch, out of a wilderness which she had believed
+to hold nothing save the ruined splendours of the past, had come one
+who, like the traditional figures of the wilderness, had attracted her
+by his very uncouthness and latent power. And the anomaly he presented
+in what might be called the vehemence of his advocacy of an outworn
+orthodoxy, in his occupation of the pulpit of St. John's, had quickened
+at once her curiosity and antagonism. It had been her sudden discovery,
+or rather her instinctive suspicion of the inner conflict in him which
+had set her standard fluttering in response. Once more (for the last
+time--something whispered--now) she had become the lady of the lists;
+she sat on her walls watching, with beating heart and straining eyes,
+the closed helm of her champion, ready to fling down the revived remnant
+of her faith as prize or forfeit. She had staked all on the hope that he
+would not lower his lance.....
+
+Saturday had passed in suspense.... And now was flooding in on her
+the certainty that he had not failed her; that he had, with a sublime
+indifference to a worldly future and success, defied the powers. With
+indifference, too, to her! She knew, of course, that he loved her. A man
+with less of greatness would have sought a middle way....
+
+When, at half past ten, she fared forth into the sunlight, she was
+filled with anticipation, excitement, concern, feelings enhanced and not
+soothed by the pulsing vibrations of the church bells in the softening
+air. The swift motion of the electric car was grateful... But at length
+the sight of familiar landmarks, old-fashioned dwellings crowded in
+between the stores and factories of lower Tower Street, brought back
+recollections of the days when she had come this way, other Sunday
+mornings, and in a more leisurely public vehicle, with her mother.
+Was it possible that she, Alison Parr, were going to church now? Her
+excitement deepened, and she found it difficult to bring herself to
+the realization that her destination was a church--the church of her
+childhood. At this moment she could only think of St. John's as the
+setting of the supreme drama.
+
+When she alighted at the corner of Burton Street there was the
+well-remembered, shifting group on the pavement in front of the church
+porch. How many times, in the summer and winter, in fair weather and
+cloudy, in rain and sleet and snow had she approached that group, as she
+approached it now! Here were the people, still, in the midst of whom
+her earliest associations had been formed, changed, indeed,-but yet the
+same. No, the change was in her, and the very vastness of that change
+came as a shock. These had stood still, anchored to their traditions,
+while she--had she grown? or merely wandered? She had searched, at
+least, and seen. She had once accepted them--if indeed as a child it
+could have been said of her that she accepted anything; she had been
+unable then, at any rate, to bring forward any comparisons.
+
+Now she beheld them, collectively, in their complacent finery, as
+representing a force, a section of the army blocking the heads of the
+passes of the world's progress, resting on their arms, but ready at the
+least uneasy movement from below to man the breastworks, to fling down
+the traitor from above, to fight fiercely for the solidarity of
+their order. And Alison even believed herself to detect, by something
+indefinable in their attitudes as they stood momentarily conversing
+in lowered voices, an aroused suspicion, an uneasy anticipation. Her
+imagination went so far as to apprehend, as they greeted her unwonted
+appearance, that they read in it an addition to other vague and
+disturbing phenomena. Her colour was high.
+
+"Why, my dear," said Mrs. Atterbury, "I thought you had gone back to New
+York long ago!"
+
+Beside his mother stood Gordon--more dried up, it seemed, than ever.
+Alison recalled him, as on this very spot, a thin, pale boy in short
+trousers, and Mrs. Atterbury a beautiful and controlled young matron
+associated with St. John's and with children's parties. She was
+wonderful yet, with her white hair and straight nose, her erect figure
+still slight. Alison knew that Mrs. Atterbury had never forgiven her
+for rejecting her son--or rather for being the kind of woman who could
+reject him.
+
+"Surely you haven't been here all summer?"
+
+Alison admitted it, characteristically, without explanations.
+
+"It seems so natural to see you here at the old church, after all these
+years," the lady went on, and Alison was aware that Mrs. Atterbury
+questioned--or rather was at a loss for the motives which had led such
+an apostate back to the fold. "We must thank Mr. Hodder, I suppose. He's
+very remarkable. I hear he is resuming the services to-day for the first
+time since June."
+
+Alison was inclined to read a significance into Mrs. Atterbury's glance
+at her son, who was clearing his throat.
+
+"But--where is Mr. Parr?" he asked. "I understand he has come back from
+his cruise."
+
+"Yes, he is back. I came without--him---as you see."
+
+She found a certain satisfaction in adding to the mystification, to the
+disquietude he betrayed by fidgeting more than usual.
+
+"But--he always comes when he is in town. Business--I suppose--ahem!"
+
+"No," replied Alison, dropping her bomb with cruel precision, "he has
+gone to Calvary."
+
+The agitation was instantaneous.
+
+"To Calvary!" exclaimed mother and son in one breath.
+
+"Why?" It was Gordon who demanded. "A--a special occasion there--a
+bishop or something?"
+
+"I'm afraid you must ask him," she said.
+
+She was delayed on the steps, first by Nan Ferguson, then by the
+Laureston Greys, and her news outdistanced her to the porch. Charlotte
+Plimpton looking very red and solid, her eyes glittering with
+excitement, blocked her way.
+
+"Alison?" she cried, in the slightly nasal voice that was a Gore
+inheritance, "I'm told your father's gone to Calvary! Has Mr. Hodder
+offended him? I heard rumours--Wallis seems to be afraid that something
+has happened."
+
+"He hasn't said anything about it to me, Charlotte," said Alison, in
+quiet amusement, "but then he wouldn't, you know. I don't live here
+any longer, and he has no reason to think that I would be interested in
+church matters."
+
+"But--why did you come?" Charlotte demanded, with Gore naivete.
+
+Alison smiled.
+
+"You mean--what was my motive?"
+
+Charlotte actually performed the miracle of getting redder. She was
+afraid of Alison--much more afraid since she had known of her vogue in
+the East. When Alison had put into execution the astounding folly (to
+the Gore mind) of rejecting the inheritance of millions to espouse
+a profession, it had been Charlotte Plimpton who led the chorus of
+ridicule and disapproval. But success, to the Charlotte Plimptons, is
+its own justification, and now her ambition (which had ramifications)
+was to have Alison "do" her a garden. Incidentally, the question had
+flashed through her mind as to how much Alison's good looks had helped
+towards her triumph in certain shining circles.
+
+"Oh, of course I didn't mean that," she hastened to deny, although
+it was exactly what she had meant. Her curiosity unsatisfied--and
+not likely to be satisfied at once, she shifted abruptly to the other
+burning subject. "I was so glad when I learned you hadn't gone. Grace
+Larrabbee's garden is a dream, my dear. Wallis and I stopped there the
+other day and the caretaker showed it to us. Can't you make a plan for
+me, so that I may begin next spring? And there's something else I wanted
+to ask you. Wallis and I are going to New York the end of the month.
+Shall you be there?"
+
+"I don't know," said Alison, cautiously.
+
+"We want so much to see one or two of your gardens on Long Island, and
+especially the Sibleys', on the Hudson. I know it will be late in the
+season,--but don't you think you could take us, Alison? And I intend to
+give you a dinner. I'll write you a note. Here's Wallis."
+
+"Well, well, well," said Mr. Plimpton, shaking Alison's hand. "Where's
+father? I hear he's gone to Calvary."
+
+Alison made her escape. Inside the silent church, Eleanor Goodrich gave
+her a smile and a pressure of welcome. Beside her, standing behind the
+rear pew, were Asa Waring and--Mr. Bentley! Mr. Bentley returned to St.
+John's!
+
+"You have come!" Alison whispered.
+
+He understood her. He took her hand in his and looked down into her
+upturned face.
+
+"Yes, my dear," he said, "and my girls have come Sally Grover and the
+others, and some friends from Dalton Street and elsewhere."
+
+The news, the sound of this old gentleman's voice and the touch of his
+hand suddenly filled her with a strange yet sober happiness. Asa Waring,
+though he had not overheard, smiled at her too, as in sympathy. His
+austere face was curiously illuminated, and she knew instinctively that
+in some way he shared her happiness. Mr. Bentley had come back! Yes, it
+was an augury. From childhood she had always admired Asa Waring, and now
+she felt a closer tie....
+
+She reached the pew, hesitated an instant, and slipped forward on her
+knees. Years had gone by since she had prayed, and even now she made no
+attempt to translate into words the intensity of her yearning--for what?
+Hodder's success, for one thing,--and by success she meant that he might
+pursue an unfaltering course. True to her temperament, she did not
+look for the downfall of the forces opposed to him. She beheld him
+persecuted, yet unyielding, and was thus lifted to an exaltation
+that amazed... If he could do it, such a struggle must sorely have an
+ultimate meaning! Thus she found herself, trembling, on the borderland
+of faith...
+
+She arose, bewildered, her pulses beating. And presently glancing about,
+she took in that the church was fuller than she ever remembered having
+seen it, and the palpitating suspense she felt seemed to pervade, as
+it were, the very silence. With startling abruptness, the silence was
+broken by the tones of the great organ that rolled and reverberated
+among the arches; distant voices took up the processional; the white
+choir filed past,--first the treble voices of the boys, then the deeper
+notes of the--men,--turned and mounted the chancel steps, and then she
+saw Hodder. Her pew being among the first, he passed very near her.
+Did he know she would be there? The sternness of his profile told her
+nothing. He seemed at that moment removed, set apart, consecrated--this
+was the word that came to her, and yet she was keenly conscious of his
+presence.
+
+Tingling, she found herself repeating, inwardly, two, lines of the hymn
+
+          "Lay hold on life, and it shall be
+          Thy joy and crown eternally."
+
+"Lay hold on life!"
+
+The service began,--the well-remembered, beautiful appeal and prayers
+which she could still repeat, after a lapse of time, almost by heart;
+and their music and rhythm, the simple yet magnificent language in
+which they were clothed--her own language--awoke this morning a
+racial instinct strong in her,--she had not known how strong. Or was it
+something in Hodder's voice that seemed to illumine the ancient words
+with a new meaning? Raising her eyes to the chancel she studied his
+head, and found in it still another expression of that race, the history
+of which had been one of protest, of development of its own character
+and personality. Her mind went back to her first talk with him, in the
+garden, and she saw how her intuition had recognized in him then the
+spirit of a people striving to assert itself.
+
+She stood with tightened lips, during the Apostles' Creed, listening to
+his voice as it rose, strong and unfaltering, above the murmur of the
+congregation.
+
+At last she saw him swiftly crossing the chancel, mounting the pulpit
+steps, and he towered above her, a dominant figure, his white surplice
+sharply outlined against the dark stone of the pillar. The hymn died
+away, the congregation sat down. There was a sound in the church,
+expectant, presaging, like the stirring of leaves at the first breath of
+wind, and then all was silent.
+
+
+
+II
+
+He had preached for an hour--longer, perhaps. Alison could not have said
+how long. She had lost all sense of time.
+
+No sooner had the text been spoken, "Except a man be born again, he
+cannot see the Kingdom of God," than she seemed to catch a fleeting
+glimpse of an hitherto unimagined Personality. Hundreds of times she
+had heard those words, and they had been as meaningless to her as
+to Nicodemus. But now--now something was brought home to her of the
+magnificent certainty with which they must first have been spoken, of
+the tone and bearing and authority of him who had uttered them. Was
+Christ like that? And could it be a Truth, after all, a truth only to be
+grasped by one who had experienced it?
+
+It was in vain that man had tried to evade this, the supreme revelation
+of Jesus Christ, had sought to substitute ceremonies and sacrifices for
+spiritual rebirth. It was in vain that the Church herself had, from time
+to time, been inclined to compromise. St. Paul, once the strict Pharisee
+who had laboured for the religion of works, himself had been reborn into
+the religion of the Spirit. It was Paul who had liberated that message
+of rebirth, which the world has been so long in grasping, from the
+narrow bounds of Palestine and sent it ringing down the ages to the
+democracies of the twentieth century.
+
+And even Paul, though not consciously inconsistent, could not rid
+himself completely of that ancient, automatic, conception of religion
+which the Master condemned, but had on occasions attempted fruitlessly
+to unite the new with the old. And thus, for a long time, Christianity
+had been wrongly conceived as history, beginning with what to Paul and
+the Jews was an historical event, the allegory of the Garden of
+Eden, the fall of Adam, and ending with the Jewish conception of the
+Atonement. This was a rationalistic and not a spiritual religion.
+
+The miracle was not the vision, whatever its nature, which Saul beheld
+on the road to Damascus. The miracle was the result of that vision, the
+man reborn. Saul, the persecutor of Christians, become Paul, who spent
+the rest of his days, in spite of persecution and bodily infirmities,
+journeying tirelessly up and down the Roman Empire, preaching the
+risen Christ, and labouring more abundantly than they all! There was no
+miracle in the New Testament more wonderful than this.
+
+The risen Christ! Let us not trouble ourselves about the psychological
+problems involved, problems which the first century interpreted in its
+own simple way. Modern, science has taught us this much, at least,
+that we have by no means fathomed the limits even of a transcendent
+personality. If proofs of the Resurrection and Ascension were demanded,
+let them be spiritual proofs, and there could be none more convincing
+than the life of the transformed Saul, who had given to the modern,
+western world the message of salvation....
+
+That afternoon, as Alison sat motionless on a distant hillside of the
+Park, gazing across the tree-dotted, rolling country to the westward,
+she recalled the breathless silence in the church when he had reached
+this point and paused, looking down at the congregation. By the subtle
+transmission of thought, of feeling which is characteristic at dramatic
+moments of bodies of people, she knew that he had already contrived
+to stir them to the quick. It was not so much that these opening words
+might have been startling to the strictly orthodox, but the added fact
+that Hodder had uttered them. The sensation in the pews, as Alison
+interpreted it and exulted over it, was one of bewildered amazement that
+this was their rector, the same man who had preached to them in June.
+Like Paul, of whom he spoke, he too was transformed, had come to his
+own, radiating a new power that seemed to shine in his face.
+
+Still agitated, she considered that discourse now in her solitude,
+what it meant for him, for her, for the Church and civilization that
+a clergyman should have had the courage to preach it. He himself had
+seemed unconscious of any courage; had never once--she recalled--been
+sensational. He had spoken simply, even in the intensest moments of
+denunciation. And she wondered now how he had managed, without stripping
+himself, without baring the intimate, sacred experiences of his own
+soul, to convey to them, so nobly, the change which had taken place in
+him....
+
+He began by referring to the hope with which he had come to St. John's,
+and the gradual realization that the church was a failure--a dismal
+failure when compared to the high ideal of her Master. By her fruits she
+should be known and judged. From the first he had contemplated, with a
+heavy heart, the sin and misery at their very gates. Not three blocks
+distant children were learning vice in the streets, little boys of seven
+and eight, underfed and anaemic, were driven out before dawn to sell
+newspapers, little girls thrust forth to haunt the saloons and beg,
+while their own children were warmed and fed. While their own daughters
+were guarded, young women in Dayton Street were forced to sell
+themselves into a life which meant slow torture, inevitable early death.
+Hopeless husbands and wives were cast up like driftwood by the cruel,
+resistless flood of modern civilization--the very civilization which
+yielded their wealth and luxury. The civilization which professed the
+Spirit of Christ, and yet was pitiless.
+
+He confessed to them that for a long time he had been blind to the
+truth, had taken the inherited, unchristian view that the disease which
+caused vice and poverty might not be cured, though its ulcers might be
+alleviated. He had not, indeed, clearly perceived and recognized the
+disease. He had regarded Dalton Street in a very special sense as a
+reproach to St. John's, but now he saw that all such neighbourhoods were
+in reality a reproach to the city, to the state, to the nation. True
+Christianity and Democracy were identical, and the congregation of St.
+John's, as professed Christians and citizens, were doubly responsible,
+inasmuch as they not only made no protest or attempt to change a
+government which permitted the Dalton Streets to exist, but inasmuch
+also as,--directly or indirectly,--they derived a profit from conditions
+which were an abomination to God. It would be but an idle mockery for
+them to go and build a settlement house, if they did not first reform
+their lives.
+
+Here there had been a decided stir among the pews. Hodder had not seemed
+to notice it.
+
+When he, their rector, had gone to Dalton Street to invite the poor and
+wretched into God's Church, he was met by the scornful question: "Are
+the Christians of the churches any better than we? Christians own the
+grim tenements in which we live, the saloons and brothels by which
+we are surrounded, which devour our children. Christians own the
+establishments which pay us starvation wages; profit by politics, and
+take toll from our very vice; evade the laws and reap millions, while we
+are sent to jail. Is their God a God who will lift us out of our misery
+and distress? Are their churches for the poor? Are not the very pews in
+which they sit as closed to us as their houses?"
+
+"I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot. I would thou wert
+cold or hot."
+
+One inevitable conclusion of such a revelation was that he had not
+preached to them the vital element of Christianity. And the very
+fact that his presentation of religion had left many indifferent or
+dissatisfied was proof-positive that he had dwelt upon non-essentials,
+laid emphasis upon the mistaken interpretations of past ages. There
+were those within the Church who were content with this, who--like the
+Pharisees of old--welcomed a religion which did not interfere with
+their complacency, with their pursuit of pleasure and wealth, with
+their special privileges; welcomed a Church which didn't raise her voice
+against the manner of their lives--against the order, the Golden
+Calf which they had set up, which did not accuse them of deliberately
+retarding the coming of the Kingdom of God.
+
+Ah, that religion was not religion, for religion was a spiritual, not
+a material affair. In that religion, vainly designed by man as a
+compromise between God and Mammon, there was none of the divine
+discontent of the true religion of the Spirit, no need of the rebirth
+of the soul. And those who held it might well demand, with Nicodemus and
+the rulers of the earth, "How can these things be?"
+
+And there were others who still lingered in the Church, perplexed and
+wistful, who had come to him and confessed that the so-called catholic
+acceptance of divine truths, on which he had hitherto dwelt, meant
+nothing to them. To these, in particular, he owed a special reparation,
+and he took this occasion to announce a series of Sunday evening sermons
+on the Creeds. So long as the Creeds remained in the Prayer Book it was
+his duty to interpret them in terms not only of modern thought, but in
+harmony with the real significance of the Person and message of Jesus
+Christ. Those who had come to him questioning, he declared, were a
+thousand times right in refusing to accept the interpretations of other
+men, the consensus of opinion of more ignorant ages, expressed in an
+ancient science and an archaic philosophy.
+
+And what should be said of the vast and ever increasing numbers of those
+not connected with the Church, who had left it or were leaving it? and
+of the less fortunate to whose bodily wants they had been ministering
+in the parish house, for whom it had no spiritual message, and who never
+entered its doors? The necessity of religion, of getting in touch with,
+of dependence on the Spirit of the Universe was inherent in man, and yet
+there were thousands--nay, millions in the nation to-day in whose hearts
+was an intense and unsatisfied yearning, who perceived no meaning in
+life, no Cause for which to work, who did not know what Christianity
+was, who had never known what it was, who wist not where to turn to
+find out. Education had brought many of them to discern, in the Church's
+teachings, an anachronistic medley of myths and legends, of theories of
+schoolmen and theologians, of surviving pagan superstitions which
+could not be translated into life. They saw, in Christianity, only
+the adulterations of the centuries. If any one needed a proof of the
+yearning people felt, let him go to the bookshops, or read in the
+publishers' lists to-day the announcements of books on religion. There
+was no supply where there was no demand.
+
+Truth might no longer be identified with Tradition, and the day was past
+when councils and synods might determine it for all mankind. The era of
+forced acceptance of philosophical doctrines and dogmas was past,
+and that of freedom, of spiritual rebirth, of vicarious suffering, of
+willing sacrifice and service for a Cause was upon them. That cause was
+Democracy. Christ was uniquely the Son of God because he had lived and
+suffered and died in order to reveal to the world the meaning of this
+life and of the hereafter--the meaning not only for the individual, but
+for society as well. Nothing might be added to or subtracted from that
+message--it was complete.
+
+True faith was simply trusting--trusting that Christ gave to the world
+the revelation of God's plan. And the Saviour himself had pointed out
+the proof: "If any man do his will, he shall know of the doctrine,
+whether it be of God, or whether I speak for myself." Christ had
+repeatedly rebuked those literal minds which had demanded material
+evidence: true faith spurned it, just as true friendship, true love
+between man and man, true trust scorned a written bond. To paraphrase
+St. James's words, faith without trust is dead--because faith without
+trust is impossible. God is a Spirit, only to be recognized in the
+Spirit, and every one of the Saviour's utterances were--not of the
+flesh, of the man--but of the Spirit within him. "He that hath seen me
+hath seen the Father;" and "Why callest thou me good? none is good save
+one, that is, God." The Spirit, the Universal Meaning of Life, incarnate
+in the human Jesus.
+
+To be born again was to overcome our spiritual blindness, and then, and
+then only, we might behold the spirit shining in the soul of Christ.
+That proof had sufficed for Mark, had sufficed for the writer of the
+sublime Fourth Gospel, had sufficed for Paul. Let us lift this
+wondrous fact, once and for all, out of the ecclesiastical setting and
+incorporate it into our lives. Nor need the hearts of those who seek the
+Truth, who fear not to face it, be troubled if they be satisfied, from
+the Gospels, that the birth of Jesus was not miraculous. The physical
+never could prove the spiritual, which was the real and everlasting,
+which no discovery in science or history can take from us. The Godship
+of Christ rested upon no dogma, it was a conviction born into us with
+the new birth. And it becomes an integral part of our personality, our
+very being.
+
+The secret, then, lay in a presentation of the divine message which
+would convince and transform and electrify those who heard it to
+action--a presentation of the message in terms which the age could
+grasp. That is what Paul had done, he had drawn his figures boldly
+from the customs of the life of his day, but a more or less intimate
+knowledge of these ancient customs were necessary before modern men and
+women could understand those figures and parallels. And the Church must
+awake to her opportunities, to her perception of the Cause....
+
+What, then, was the function, the mission of the Church Universal? Once
+she had laid claim to temporal power, believed herself to be the sole
+agency of God on earth, had spoken ex cathedra on philosophy, history,
+theology, and science, had undertaken to confer eternal bliss and to
+damn forever. Her members, and even her priests, had gone from murder
+to mass and from mass to murder, and she had engaged in cruel wars and
+persecutions to curtail the liberties of mankind. Under that conception
+religion was a form of insurance of the soul. Perhaps a common,
+universal belief had been necessary in the dark ages before the
+sublime idea of education for the masses had come; but the Church
+herself--through ignorance--had opposed the growth of education, had set
+her face sternly against the development of the individual, which Christ
+had taught, the privilege of man to use the faculties of the intellect
+which God had bestowed upon him. He himself, their rector, had
+advocated a catholic acceptance, though much modified from the mediaeval
+acceptance,--one that professed to go behind it to an earlier age. Yes,
+he must admit with shame that he had been afraid to trust where God
+trusted, had feared to confide the working out of the ultimate Truth of
+the minds of the millions.
+
+The Church had been monarchical in form, and some strove stubbornly
+and blindly to keep her monarchical. Democracy in government was
+outstripping her. Let them look around, to-day, and see what was
+happening in the United States of America. A great movement was going
+on to transfer actual participation in government from the few to the
+many,--a movement towards true Democracy, and that was precisely what
+was about to happen in the Church. Her condition at present was one of
+uncertainty, transition--she feared to let go wholly of the old, she
+feared to embark upon the new. Just as the conservatives and politicians
+feared to give up the representative system, the convention, so was she
+afraid to abandon the synod, the council, and trust to man.
+
+The light was coming slowly, the change, the rebirth of the Church
+by gradual evolution. By the grace of God those who had laid the
+foundations of the Church in which he stood, of all Protestantism, had
+built for the future. The racial instinct in them had asserted itself,
+had warned them that to suppress freedom in religion were to suppress it
+in life, to paralyze that individual initiative which was the secret of
+their advancement.
+
+The new Church Universal, then, would be the militant, aggressive body
+of the reborn, whose mission it was to send out into the life of the
+nation transformed men and women who would labour unremittingly for
+the Kingdom of God. Unity would come--but unity in freedom, true
+Catholicity. The truth would gradually pervade the masses--be wrought
+out by them. Even the great evolutionary forces of the age, such as
+economic necessity, were acting to drive divided Christianity into
+consolidation, and the starving churches of country villages were now
+beginning to combine.
+
+No man might venture to predict the details of the future organization
+of the united Church, although St. Paul himself had sketched it in broad
+outline: every worker, lay and clerical, labouring according to his
+gift, teachers, executives, ministers, visitors, missionaries, healers
+of sick and despondent souls. But the supreme function of the Church was
+to inspire--to inspire individuals to willing service for the cause, the
+Cause of Democracy, the fellowship of mankind. If she failed to inspire,
+the Church would wither and perish. And therefore she must revive again
+the race of inspirers, prophets, modern Apostles to whom this gift
+was given, going on their rounds, awaking cities and arousing whole
+country-sides.
+
+But whence--it might be demanded by the cynical were the prophets to
+come? Prophets could not be produced by training and education; prophets
+must be born. Reborn,--that was the word. Let the Church have faith.
+Once her Cause were perceived, once her whole energy were directed
+towards its fulfilment, the prophets would arise, out of the East
+and out of the West, to stir mankind to higher effort, to denounce
+fearlessly the shortcomings and evils of the age. They had not failed
+in past ages, when the world had fallen into hopelessness, indifference,
+and darkness. And they would not fail now.
+
+Prophets were personalities, and Phillips Brooks himself a prophet--had
+defined personality as a conscious relationship with God. "All truth,"
+he had said, "comes to the world through personality." And down the
+ages had come an Apostolic Succession of personalities. Paul, Augustine,
+Francis, Dante, Luther, Milton,--yes, and Abraham Lincoln, and Phillips
+Brooks, whose Authority was that of the Spirit, whose light had so shone
+before men that they had glorified the Father which was in heaven; the
+current of whose Power had so radiated, in ever widening circles, as to
+make incandescent countless other souls.
+
+And which among them would declare that Abraham Lincoln, like Stephen,
+had not seen his Master in the sky?
+
+The true prophet, the true apostle, then, was one inspired and directed
+by the Spirit, the laying on of hands was but a symbol,--the symbol of
+the sublime truth that one personality caught fire from another. Let the
+Church hold fast to that symbol, as an acknowledgment, a reminder of
+a supreme mystery. Tradition had its value when it did not deteriorate
+into superstition, into the mechanical, automatic transmission
+characteristic of the mediaeval Church, for the very suggestion of which
+Peter had rebuked Simon in Samaria. For it would be remembered that
+Simon had said: "Give me also this power, that on whomsoever I lay
+hands, he may receive the Holy Ghost."
+
+The true successor to the Apostles must be an Apostle himself.
+
+Jesus had seldom spoken literally, and the truths he sought to
+impress upon the world had of necessity been clothed in figures and
+symbols,--for spiritual truths might be conveyed in no other way. The
+supreme proof of his Godship, of his complete knowledge of the meaning
+of life was to be found in his parables. To the literal, material mind,
+for example, the parable of the talents was merely an unintelligible
+case of injustice.... What was meant by the talents? They were
+opportunities for service. Experience taught us that when we embraced
+one opportunity, one responsibility, the acceptance of it invariably led
+to another, and so the servant who had five talents, five opportunities,
+gained ten. The servant who had two gained two more. But the servant of
+whom only one little service was asked refused that, and was cast into
+outer darkness, to witness another performing the task which should
+have been his. Hell, here and hereafter, was the spectacle of wasted
+opportunity, and there is no suffering to compare to it.
+
+The crime, the cardinal sin was with those who refused to serve, who
+shut their eyes to the ideal their Lord had held up, who strove to
+compromise with Jesus Christ himself, to twist and torture his message
+to suit their own notions as to how life should be led; to please God
+and Mammon at the same time, to bind Christ's Church for their comfort
+and selfish convenience. Of them it was written, that they shut up
+the Kingdom of Heaven against men; for they neither go in themselves,
+neither suffer them that are entering to go in. Were these any better
+than the people who had crucified the Lord for his idealism, and because
+he had not brought them the material Kingdom for which they longed?
+
+That servant who had feared to act, who had hid his talent in the
+ground, who had said unto his lord, "I knew thee that thou art an hard
+man, reaping where thou hadst not sown," was the man without faith, the
+atheist who sees only cruelty and indifference in the order of things,
+who has no spiritual sight. But to the other servants it was said, "Thou
+halt been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many
+things. Enter thou into the joy of thy lord."
+
+The meaning of life, then, was service, and by life our Lord did not
+mean mere human existence, which is only a part of life. The Kingdom of
+heaven is a state, and may begin here. And that which we saw around us
+was only one expression of that eternal life--a medium to work through,
+towards God. All was service, both here and hereafter, and he that had
+not discovered that the joy of service was the only happiness worth
+living for could have no conception of the Kingdom. To those who knew,
+there was no happiness like being able to say, "I have found my place in
+God's plan, I am of use." Such was salvation....
+
+And in the parable of the Prodigal Son may be read the history of what
+are known as the Protestant nations. What happens logically when the
+individual is suddenly freed from the restraint of external authority
+occurred when Martin Luther released the vital spark of Christianity,
+which he got from Paul, and from Christ himself--the revelation of
+individual responsibility, that God the Spirit would dwell, by grace, in
+the individual soul. Ah, we had paid a terrible yet necessary price for
+freedom. We had wandered far from the Father, we had been reduced to
+the very husks of individualism, become as swine. We beheld around us,
+to-day, selfishness, ruthless competition, as great contrasts between
+misery and luxury as in the days of the Roman Empire. But should we, for
+that reason, return to the leading-strings of authority? Could we if we
+would? A little thought ought to convince us that the liberation of the
+individual could not be revoked, that it had forever destroyed the power
+of authority to carry conviction. To go back to the Middle Ages would be
+to deteriorate and degenerate. No, we must go on....
+
+Luther's movement, in religion, had been the logical forerunner of
+democracy, of universal suffrage in government, the death-knell of
+that misinterpretation of Christianity as the bulwark of monarchy and
+hierarchy had been sounded when he said, "Ich kann nicht anders!" The
+new Republic founded on the western continent had announced to the world
+the initiation of the transfer of Authority to the individual soul.
+God, the counterpart of the King, the ruler in a high heaven of a flat
+terrestrial expanse, outside of the world, was now become the Spirit
+of a million spheres, the indwelling spirit in man. Democracy and the
+religion of Jesus Christ both consisted in trusting the man--yes, and
+the woman--whom God trusts. Christianity was individualism carried
+beyond philosophy into religion, and the Christian, the ideal citizen
+of the democracy, was free since he served not because he had to, but
+because he desired to of his own will, which, paradoxically, is God's
+will. God was in politics, to the confusion of politicians; God in
+government. And in some greater and higher sense than we had yet
+perceived, the saying 'vox populi vox dei' was eternally true. He
+entered into the hearts of people and moved them, and so the world
+progressed. It was the function of the Church to make Christians,
+until--when the Kingdom of God should come--the blending should be
+complete. Then Church and State would be identical, since all the
+members of the one would be the citizens of the other....
+
+"I will arise and go to my father." Rebirth! A sense of responsibility,
+of consecration. So we had come painfully through our materialistic
+individualism, through our selfish Protestantism, to a glimpse of the
+true Protestantism--Democracy.
+
+Our spiritual vision was glowing clearer. We were beginning to perceive
+that charity did not consist in dispensing largesse after making a
+fortune at the expense of one's fellow-men; that there was something
+still wrong in a government that permits it. It was gradually becoming
+plain to us, after two thousand years, that human bodies and souls
+rotting in tenements were more valuable than all the forests on all the
+hills; that government, Christian government, had something to do with
+these.
+
+We should embody, in government, those sublime words of the Master,
+"Suffer little children to come unto me." And the government of the
+future would care for the little children. We were beginning to do it.
+Here, as elsewhere, Christianity and reason went hand in hand, for
+the child became the man who either preyed on humanity and filled the
+prisons and robbed his fellows, or else grew into a useful, healthy
+citizen. It was nothing less than sheer folly as well as inhuman cruelty
+to let the children sleep in crowded, hot rooms, reeking with diseases,
+and run wild throughout the long summer, learning vice in the city
+streets. And we still had slavery--economic slavery--yes, and the more
+horrible slavery of women and young girls in vice--as much a concern of
+government as the problem which had confronted it in 1861.... We
+were learning that there was something infinitely more sacred than
+property....
+
+And now Alison recalled, only to be thrilled again by an electric
+sensation she had never before experienced with such intensity, the look
+of inspiration on the preacher's face as he closed. The very mists of
+the future seemed to break before his importuning gaze, and his eyes
+seemed indeed to behold, against the whitening dawn of the spiritual
+age he predicted, the slender spires of a new Church sprung from the
+foundations of the old. A Church, truly catholic, tolerant, whose
+portals were wide in welcome to all mankind. The creative impulse,
+he had declared, was invariably religious, the highest art but the
+expression of the mute yearnings of a people, of a race. Thus had once
+arisen, all over Europe, those wonderful cathedrals which still
+cast their spell upon the world, and art to-day would respond--was
+responding--to the unutterable cravings of mankind, would strive once
+more to express in stone and glass and pigment what nations felt.
+Generation after generation would labour with unflagging zeal until
+the art sculptured fragment of the new Cathedral--the new Cathedral of
+Democracy--pointed upward toward the blue vault of heaven. Such was
+his vision--God the Spirit, through man reborn, carrying out his great
+Design...
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII. "WHICH SAY TO THE SEERS, SEE NOT"
+
+
+I
+
+As Alison arose from her knees and made her way out of the pew, it was
+the expression on Charlotte Plimpton's face which brought her back once
+more to a sense of her surroundings; struck her, indeed, like a physical
+blow. The expression was a scandalized one. Mrs. Plimpton had moved
+towards her, as if to speak, but Alison hurried past, her exaltation
+suddenly shattered, replaced by a rising tide of resentment, of angry
+amazement against a materialism so solid as to remain unshaken by the
+words which had so uplifted her. Eddies were forming in the aisle as
+the people streamed slowly out of the church, and snatches of their
+conversation, in undertones, reached her ears.
+
+"I should never have believed it!"
+
+"Mr. Hodder, of all men..."
+
+"The bishop!"
+
+Outside the swinging doors, in the vestibule, the voices were raised a
+little, and she found her path blocked.
+
+"It's incredible!" she heard Gordon Atterbury saying to little Everett
+Constable, who was listening gloomily.
+
+"Sheer Unitarianism, socialism, heresy."
+
+His attention was forcibly arrested by Alison, in whose cheeks bright
+spots of colour burned. He stepped aside, involuntarily, apologetically,
+as though he had instinctively read in her attitude an unaccountable
+disdain. Everett Constable bowed uncertainly, for Alison scarcely
+noticed them.
+
+"Ahem!" said Gordon, nervously, abandoning his former companion and
+joining her, "I was just saying, it's incredible--"
+
+She turned on him.
+
+"It is incredible," she cried, "that persons who call themselves
+Christians cannot recognize their religion when they hear it preached."
+
+He gave back before her, visibly, in an astonishment which would have
+been ludicrous but for her anger. He had never understood her--such
+had been for him her greatest fascination;--and now she was less
+comprehensible than ever. The time had been when he would cheerfully
+have given over his hope of salvation to have been able to stir her.
+He had never seen her stirred, and the sight of her even now in this
+condition was uncomfortably agitating. Of all things, an heretical
+sermon would appear to have accomplished this miracle!
+
+"Christianity!" he stammered.
+
+"Yes, Christianity." Her voice tingled. "I don't pretend to know much
+about it, but Mr. Hodder has at least made it plain that it is something
+more than dead dogmas, ceremonies, and superstitions."
+
+He would have said something, but her one thought was to escape, to be
+alone. These friends of her childhood were at that moment so distasteful
+as to have become hateful. Some one laid a hand upon her arm.
+
+"Can't we take you home, Alison? I don't see your motor."
+
+It was Mrs. Constable.
+
+"No, thanks--I'm going to walk," Alison answered, yet something in Mrs.
+Constable's face, in Mrs. Constable's voice, made her pause. Something
+new, something oddly sympathetic. Their eyes met, and Alison saw that
+the other woman's were tired, almost haggard--yet understanding.
+
+"Mr. Hodder was right--a thousand times right, my dear," she said.
+
+Alison could only stare at her, and the crimson in the bright spots of
+her cheeks spread over her face. Why had Mrs. Constable supposed that
+she would care to hear the sermon praised? But a second glance put her
+in possession of the extraordinary fact that Mrs. Constable herself was
+profoundly moved.
+
+"I knew he would change," she went on, "I have seen for some time that
+he was too big a man not to change. But I had no conception that he
+would have such power, and such courage, as he has shown this morning.
+It is not only that he dared to tell us what we were--smaller men might
+have done that, and it is comparatively easy to denounce. But he has
+the vision to construct, he is a seer himself--he has really made me see
+what Christianity is. And as long as I live I shall never forget those
+closing sentences."
+
+"And now?" asked Alison. "And now what will happen?"
+
+Mrs. Constable changed colour. Her tact, on which she prided herself,
+had deserted her in a moment of unlooked-for emotion.
+
+"Oh, I know that my father and the others will try to put him out--but
+can they?" Alison asked.
+
+It was Mrs. Constable's turn to stare. The head she suddenly and
+impulsively put forth trembled on Alison's wrist.
+
+"I don't know, Alison--I'm afraid they can. It is too terrible to think
+about.... And they can't--they won't believe that many changes are
+coming, that this is but one of many signs... Do come and see me."
+
+Alison left her, marvelling at the passage between them, and that, of
+all persons in the congregation of St. John's, the lightning should have
+struck Mrs. Constable...
+
+Turning to the right on Burton Street, she soon found herself walking
+rapidly westward through deserted streets lined by factories and
+warehouses, and silent in the Sabbath calm.... She thought of Hodder,
+she would have liked to go to him in that hour....
+
+In Park Street, luncheon was half over, and Nelson Langmaid was at
+the table with her father. The lawyer glanced at her curiously as she
+entered the room, and his usual word of banter, she thought, was rather
+lame. The two went on, for some time, discussing a railroad suit in
+Texas. And Alison, as she hurried through her meal, leaving the dishes
+almost untouched, scarcely heard them. Once, in her reverie, her
+thoughts reverted to another Sunday when Hodder had sat, an honoured
+guest, in the chair which Mr. Langmaid now occupied....
+
+It was not until they got up from the table that her father turned to
+her.
+
+"Did you have a good sermon?" he asked.
+
+It was the underlying note of challenge to which she responded.
+
+"The only good sermon I have ever heard."
+
+Their eyes met. Langmaid looked down at the tip of his cigar.
+
+"Mr. Hodder," said Eldon Parr, "is to be congratulated."
+
+
+
+II
+
+Hodder, when the service was over, had sought the familiar recess in the
+robing-room, the words which he himself had spoken still ringing in
+his ears. And then he recalled the desperate prayer with which he had
+entered the pulpit, that it might be given him in that hour what to say:
+the vivid memories of the passions and miseries in Dalton Street, the
+sudden, hot response of indignation at the complacency confronting him.
+His voice had trembled with anger.... He remembered, as he had paused in
+his denunciation of these who had eyes and saw not, meeting the
+upturned look of Alison Parr, and his anger had turned to pity for
+their blindness--which once had been his own; and he had gone on and on,
+striving to interpret for them his new revelation of the message of the
+Saviour, to impress upon them the dreadful yet sublime meaning of life
+eternal. And it was in that moment the vision of the meaning of the
+evolution of his race, of the Prodigal turning to responsibility--of
+which he once had had a glimpse--had risen before his eyes in its
+completeness--the guiding hand of God in history! The Spirit in these
+complacent souls, as yet unstirred....
+
+So complete, now, was his forgetfulness of self, of his future, of the
+irrevocable consequences of the step he had taken, that it was only
+gradually he became aware that some one was standing near him, and with
+a start he recognized McCrae.
+
+"There are some waiting to speak to ye," his assistant said.
+
+"Oh!" Hodder exclaimed. He began, mechanically, to divest himself of his
+surplice. McCrae stood by.
+
+"I'd like to say a word, first--if ye don't mind--" he began.
+
+The rector looked at him quickly.
+
+"I'd like just to thank ye for that sermon--I can say no more now," said
+McCrae; he turned away, and left the room abruptly.
+
+This characteristic tribute from the inarticulate, loyal Scotchman left
+him tingling.... He made his way to the door and saw the people in the
+choir room, standing silently, in groups, looking toward him. Some one
+spoke to him, and he recognized Eleanor Goodrich.
+
+"We couldn't help coming, Mr. Hodder--just to tell you how much we
+admire you. It was wonderful, what you said."
+
+He grew hot with gratitude, with thankfulness that there were some who
+understood--and that this woman was among them, and her husband... Phil
+Goodrich took him by the hand.
+
+"I can understand that kind of religion," he said. "And, if necessary, I
+can fight for it. I have come to enlist."
+
+"And I can understand it, too," added the sunburned Evelyn. "I hope you
+will let me help."
+
+That was all they said, but Hodder understood. Eleanor Goodrich's eyes
+were dimmed as she smiled an her sister and her husband--a smile that
+bespoke the purest quality of pride. And it was then, as they made way
+for others, that the full value of their allegiance was borne in upon
+him, and he grasped the fact that the intangible barrier which had
+separated him from them had at last been broken down: His look followed
+the square shoulders and aggressive, close-cropped head of Phil
+Goodrich, the firm, athletic figure of Evelyn, who had represented to
+him an entire class of modern young women, vigorous, athletic, with
+a scorn of cant in which he secretly sympathized, hitherto frankly
+untouched by spiritual interests of any sort. She had, indeed, once
+bluntly told him that church meant nothing to her....
+
+In that little company gathered in the choir room were certain members
+of his congregation whom, had he taken thought, he would least have
+expected to see. There were Mr. and Mrs. Bradley, an elderly couple
+who had attended St. John's for thirty years; and others of the same
+unpretentious element of his parish who were finding in modern life an
+increasingly difficult and bewildering problem. There was little Miss
+Tallant, an assiduous guild worker whom he had thought the most orthodox
+of persons; Miss Ramsay, who taught the children of the Italian mothers;
+Mr. Carton, the organist, a professed free-thinker, with whom Hodder had
+had many a futile argument; and Martha Preston, who told him that he had
+made her think about religion seriously for the first time in her life.
+
+And there were others, types equally diverse. Young men of the choir,
+and others whom he had never seen, who informed him shyly that they
+would come again, and bring their friends....
+
+And all the while, in the background, Hodder had been aware of a
+familiar face--Horace Bentley's. Beside him, when at length he drew
+near, was his friend Asa Waring--a strangely contrasted type. The
+uncompromising eyes of a born leader of men flashed from beneath the
+heavy white eyebrows, the button of the Legion of Honour gleaming in
+his well-kept coat seemed emblematic of the fire which in his youth had
+driven him forth to fight for the honour of his country--a fire still
+undimmed. It was he who spoke first.
+
+"This is a day I never expected to see, Mr. Hodder," he said, "for it
+has brought back to this church the man to whom it owes its existence.
+Mr. Bentley did more, by his labour and generosity, his true
+Christianity, his charity and his wisdom, for St. John's than any other
+individual. It is you who have brought him back, and I wish personally
+to express my gratitude."
+
+Mr. Bentley, in mild reproof, laid his hand upon the t, shoulder of his
+old friend.
+
+"Ah, Asa," he protested, "you shouldn't say such things."
+
+"Had it not been for Mr. Bentley," Hodder explained, "I should not be
+here to-day."
+
+Asa Waring pierced the rector with his eye, appreciating the genuine
+feeling with which these words were spoken. And yet his look contained a
+question.
+
+"Mr. Bentley," Hodder added, "has been my teacher this summer."
+
+The old gentleman's hand trembled a little on the goldheaded stick.
+
+"It is a matter of more pride to me than I can express, sir, that you
+are the rector of this church with which my most cherished memories are
+associated," he said. "But I cannot take any part of the credit you give
+me for the splendid vision which you have raised up before us to-day,
+for your inspired interpretation of history, of the meaning of our own
+times. You have moved me, you have given me more hope and courage than
+I have had for many a long year--and I thank you, Mr. Hodder. I am
+sure that God will prosper and guide you in what you have so nobly
+undertaken."
+
+Mr. Bentley turned away, walking towards the end of the room.... Asa
+Waring broke the silence.
+
+"I didn't know that you knew him, that you had seen what he is
+doing--what he has done in this city. I cannot trust myself, Mr. Hodder,
+to speak of Horace Bentley's life... I feel too strongly on the subject.
+I have watched, year by year, this detestable spirit of greed, this lust
+for money and power creeping over our country, corrupting our people and
+institutions, and finally tainting the Church itself. You have raised
+your voice against it, and I respect and honour and thank you for it,
+the more because you have done it without resorting to sensation, and
+apparently with no thought of yourself. And, incidentally, you have
+explained the Christian religion to me as I have never had it explained
+in my life.
+
+"I need not tell you you have made enemies--powerful ones. I can see
+that you are a man, and that you are prepared for them. They will leave
+no stone unturned, will neglect no means to put you out and disgrace
+you. They will be about your ears to-morrow--this afternoon, perhaps.
+I need not remind you that the outcome is doubtful. But I came here to
+assure you of my friendship and support in all you hope to accomplish
+in making the Church what it should be. In any event, what you have done
+to-day will be productive of everlasting good."
+
+In a corner still lingered the group which Mr. Bentley had joined. And
+Hodder, as he made his way towards it, recognized the faces of some of
+those who composed it. Sally Grower was there, and the young women who
+lived in Mr. Bentley's house, and others whose acquaintance he had made
+during the summer. Mrs. Garvin had brought little Dicky, incredibly
+changed from the wan little figure he had first beheld in the stifling
+back room in Dalton Street; not yet robust, but freckled and tanned by
+the country sun and wind. The child, whom he had seen constantly in
+the interval, ran forward joyfully, and Hodder bent down to take his
+hand....
+
+These were his friends, emblematic of the new relationship in which he
+stood to mankind. And he owed them to Horace Bentley! He wondered, as
+he greeted them, whether they knew what their allegiance meant to him in
+this hour. But it sufficed that they claimed him as their own.
+
+Behind them all stood Kate Marcy. And it struck him for the first time,
+as he gazed at her earnestly, how her appearance had changed. She gave
+him a frightened, bewildered look, as though she were unable to identify
+him now with the man she had known in the Dalton Street flat, in the
+restaurant. She was still struggling, groping, wondering, striving to
+accustom herself to the higher light of another world.
+
+"I wanted to come," she faltered. "Sally Grower brought me..."
+
+Hodder went back with them to Dalton Street. His new ministry had begun.
+And on this, the first day of it, it was fitting that he should sit at
+the table of Horace Bentley, even as on that other Sunday, two years
+agone, he had gone to the home of the first layman of the diocese, Eldon
+Parr.
+
+
+
+III
+
+The peace of God passes understanding because sorrow and joy are mingled
+therein, sorrow and joy and striving. And thus the joy of emancipation
+may be accompanied by a heavy heart. The next morning, when Hodder
+entered his study, he sighed as his eye fell upon the unusual pile of
+letters on his desk, for their writers had once been his friends. The
+inevitable breach had come at last.
+
+Most of the letters, as he had anticipated, were painful reading.
+And the silver paper-cutter with which he opened the first had been a
+Christmas present from Mrs. Burlingame, who had penned it, a lady of
+signal devotion to the church, who for many years had made it her
+task to supply and arrange the flowers on the altar. He had amazed and
+wounded her--she declared--inexpressibly, and she could no longer remain
+at St. John's--for the present, at least. A significant addition. He
+dropped the letter, and sat staring out of the window... presently
+arousing himself, setting himself resolutely to the task of reading the
+rest.
+
+In the mood in which he found himself he did not atop to philosophize on
+the rigid yet sincere attitude of the orthodox. His affection for many
+of them curiously remained, though it was with some difficulty he
+strove to reconstruct a state of mind with which he had once agreed.
+If Christianity were to sweep on, these few unbending but faithful ones
+must be sacrificed: such was the law... Many, while repudiating his new
+beliefs--or unbeliefs!--added, to their regrets of the change in him,
+protestations of a continued friendship, a conviction of his sincerity.
+Others like Mrs. Atterbury, were frankly outraged and bitter. The
+contents of one lilac-bordered envelope brought to his eyes a faint
+smile. Did he know--asked the sender of this--could he know the
+consternation he had caused in so many persons, including herself? What
+was she to believe? And wouldn't he lunch with her on Thursday?
+
+Mrs. Ferguson's letter brought another smile--more thoughtful. Her
+incoherent phrases had sprung from the heart, and the picture rose
+before him of the stout but frightened, good-natured lady who had never
+accustomed herself to the enjoyment of wealth and luxury. Mr. Ferguson
+was in such a state, and he must please not tell her husband that she
+had written. Yet much in his sermon had struck her as so true. It seemed
+wrong to her to have so much, and others so little! And he had made her
+remember many things in her early life she had forgotten. She hoped he
+would see Mr. Ferguson, and talk to him....
+
+Then there was Mrs. Constable's short note, that troubled and puzzled
+him. This, too, had in it an undercurrent of fear, and the memory came
+to him of the harrowing afternoon he had once spent with her, when
+she would have seemed to have predicted the very thing which had now
+happened to him. And yet not that thing. He divined instinctively that
+a maturer thought on the subject of his sermon had brought on an
+uneasiness as the full consequences of this new teaching had dawned upon
+her consequences which she had not foreseen when she had foretold the
+change. And he seemed to read between the lines that the renunciation he
+demanded was too great. Would he not let her come and talk to him?...
+
+Miss Brewer, a lady of no inconsiderable property, was among those who
+told him plainly that if he remained they would have to give up their
+pews. Three or four communications were even more threatening. Mr.
+Alpheus Gore, Mrs. Plimpton's brother, who at five and forty had managed
+to triple his share of the Gore inheritance, wrote that it would be his
+regretful duty to send to the bishop an Information on the subject of
+Mr. Hodder's sermon.
+
+There were, indeed, a few letters which he laid, thankfully, in a pile
+by themselves. These were mostly from certain humble members of his
+parish who had not followed their impulses to go to him after the
+service, or from strangers who had chanced to drop into the church. Some
+were autobiographical, such as those of a trained nurse, a stenographer,
+a hardware clerk who had sat up late Sunday night to summarize what that
+sermon had meant to him, how a gray and hopeless existence had taken on
+a new colour. Next Sunday he would bring a friend who lived in the same
+boarding house.... Hodder read every word of these, and all were in
+the same strain: at last they could perceive a meaning to religion, an
+application of it to such plodding lives as theirs....
+
+One or two had not understood, but had been stirred, and were coming to
+talk to him. Another was filled with a venomous class hatred....
+
+The first intimation he had of the writer of another letter seemed from
+the senses rather than the intellect. A warm glow suffused him, mounted
+to his temples as he stared at the words, turned over the sheet, and
+read at the bottom the not very legible signature. The handwriting, by
+no means classic, became then and there indelibly photographed on his
+brain, and summed up for him the characteristics, the warring elements
+in Alison Parr. "All afternoon," she wrote, "I have been thinking of
+your sermon. It was to me very wonderful--it lifted me out of myself.
+And oh, I want so much to believe unreservedly what you expressed
+so finely, that religion is democracy, or the motive power behind
+democracy--the service of humanity by the reborn. I understand it
+intellectually. I am willing to work for such a Cause, but there is
+something in me so hard that I wonder if it can dissolve. And then I
+am still unable to identify that Cause with the Church as at present
+constituted, with the dogmas and ceremonies that still exist. I am too
+thorough a radical to have your patience. And I am filled with rage--I
+can think of no milder word--on coming in contact with the living
+embodiments of that old creed, who hold its dogmas so precious. 'Which
+say to the seers, See not; and to the prophets, Prophesy not unto us
+right things, speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits.'"
+
+"You see, I have been reading Isaiah, and when I came to that paragraph
+it seemed so appropriate. These people have always existed. And will
+they not always continue to exist? I wish I could believe, wholly and
+unreservedly, that this class, always preponderant in the world, could
+be changed, diminished--done away with in a brighter future! I can, at
+least, sympathize with Isaiah's wrath.
+
+"What you said of the longing, the yearning which exists to-day amongst
+the inarticulate millions moved me most--and of the place of art in
+religion, to express that yearning. Religion the motive power of art,
+and art, too, service. 'Consider the lilies of the field.' You have made
+it, at least, all-comprehensive, have given me a new point of view for
+which I can never be sufficiently grateful--and at a time when I needed
+it desperately. That you have dared to do what you have done has been
+and will be an inspiration, not only to myself, but to many others.
+This, is a longer letter, I believe, than I have ever written in my
+life. But I wanted you to know."
+
+He reread it twice, pondering over its phrases. "A new point of view....
+at a time when I needed it desperately." It was not until then that he
+realized the full intensity of his desire for some expression from her
+since the moment he had caught sight of her in the church. But he had
+not been prepared for the unreserve, the impulsiveness with which she
+had actually written. Such was his agitation that he did not heed, at
+first, a knock on the door, which was repeated. He thrust the letter
+inside his coat as the janitor of the parish house appeared.
+
+"There is a gentleman to see you, sir, in the office," he said.
+
+Hodder went down the stairs. And he anticipated, from the light yet
+nervous pacing that he heard on the bare floor, that the visitor was
+none other than his vestryman, Mr. Gordon Atterbury. The sight of the
+gentleman's spruce figure confirmed the guess.
+
+"Good morning, Mr. Atterbury," he said as he entered.
+
+Mr. Atterbury stopped in his steps, as if he had heard a shot.
+
+"Ah--good morning, Mr. Hodder. I stopped in on my way to the office."
+
+"Sit down," said the rector.
+
+Mr. Atterbury sat down, but with the air of a man who does so under
+protest, who had not intended to. He was visibly filled and almost
+quivering with an excitement which seemed to demand active expression,
+and which the tall clergyman's physical calm and self-possession seemed
+to augment. For a moment Mr. Atterbury stared at the rector as he sat
+behind his desk. Then he cleared his throat.
+
+"I thought of writing to you, Mr. Hodder. My mother, I believe, has
+done so. But it seemed to me, on second thought, better to come to you
+direct."
+
+The rector nodded, without venturing to remark on the wisdom of the
+course.
+
+"It occurred to me," Mr. Atterbury went on, "that possibly some things I
+wish to discuss might--ahem be dispelled in a conversation. That I might
+conceivably have misunderstood certain statements in your sermon of
+yesterday."
+
+"I tried," said the rector, "to be as clear as possible."
+
+"I thought you might not fully have realized the effect of what you
+said. I ought to tell you, I think, that as soon as I reached home
+I wrote out, as accurately as I could from memory, the gist of your
+remarks. And I must say frankly, although I try to put it mildly, that
+they appear to contradict and controvert the doctrines of the Church."
+
+"Which doctrines?" Hodder asked.
+
+Gordon Atterbury sputtered.
+
+"Which doctrines?" he repeated. "Can it be possible that you
+misunderstand me? I might refer you to those which you yourself preached
+as late as last June, in a sermon which was one of the finest and most
+scholarly efforts I ever heard."
+
+"It was on that day, Mr. Atterbury," replied the rector, with a touch
+of sadness in his voice, "I made the discovery that fine and scholarly
+efforts were not Christianity."
+
+"What do you mean?" Mr. Atterbury demanded.
+
+"I mean that they do not succeed in making Christians."
+
+"And by that you imply that the members of your congregation, those who
+have been brought up and baptized and confirmed in this church, are not
+Christians?"
+
+"I am sorry to say a great many of them are not," said the rector.
+
+"In other words, you affirm that the sacrament of baptism is of no
+account."
+
+"I affirm that baptism with water is not sufficient."
+
+"I'm afraid that this is very grave," Mr. Hodder.
+
+"I quite agree with you," replied the rector, looking straight at his
+vestryman.
+
+"And I understood,--" the other went on, clearing his throat once more,
+"I think I have it correctly stated in my notes, but I wish to be quite
+clear, that you denied the doctrine of the virgin birth."
+
+Hodder made a strong effort to control himself.
+
+"What I have said I have said," he answered, "and I have said it in the
+hope that it might make some impression upon the lives of those to
+whom I spoke. You were one of them, Mr. Atterbury. And if I repeat
+and amplify my meaning now, it must be understood that I have no other
+object except that of putting you in the way of seeing that the religion
+of Christ is unique in that it is dependent upon no doctrine or dogma,
+upon no external or material sign or proof or authority whatever. I am
+utterly indifferent to any action you may contemplate taking concerning
+me. Read your four Gospels carefully. If we do not arrive, through
+contemplation of our Lord's sojourn on this earth, of his triumph
+over death, of his message--which illuminates the meaning of our lives
+here--at that inner spiritual conversion of which he continually speaks,
+and which alone will give us charity, we are not Christians."
+
+"But the doctrines of the Church, which we were taught from childhood to
+believe? The doctrines which you once professed, and of which you have
+now made such an unlooked-for repudiation!"
+
+"Yes, I have changed," said the rector, gazing seriously at the
+twitching figure of his vestryman, "I was bound, body and soul, by those
+very doctrines." He roused himself. "But on what grounds do you declare,
+Mr. Atterbury," he demanded, somewhat sternly, "that this church is
+fettered by an ancient and dogmatic conception of Christianity? Where
+are you to find what are called the doctrines of the Church? What may
+be heresy in one diocese is not so in another, and I can refer to you
+volumes written by ministers of this Church, in good standing, whose
+published opinions are the same as those I expressed in my sermon of
+yesterday. The very cornerstone of the Church is freedom, but many have
+yet to discover this, and we have held in our Communion men of such
+divergent views as Dr. Pusey and Phillips Brooks. Mr. Newman, in his
+Tract Ninety, which was sincerely written, showed that the Thirty-nine
+Articles were capable of almost any theological interpretation. From
+what authoritative source are we to draw our doctrines? In the baptismal
+service the articles of belief are stated to be in the Apostles' Creed,
+but nowhere--in this Church is it defined how their ancient language
+is to be interpreted. That is wisely left to the individual. Shall
+we interpret the Gospels by the Creeds, which in turn purport to be
+interpretations of the Gospels? Or shall we draw our conclusions as to
+what the Creeds may mean to us by pondering on the life of Christ, and
+striving to do his will? 'The letter killeth, but the Spirit maketh
+alive.'"
+
+Hodder rose, and stood facing his visitor squarely. He spoke slowly, and
+the fact that he made no gesture gave all the more force to his words.
+
+"Hereafter, Mr. Atterbury," he added, "so long as I am rector of this
+church, I am going to do my best to carry out the spirit of Christ's
+teaching--to make Christians. And there shall be no more compromise, so
+far as I can help it."
+
+Gordon Atterbury had grown very pale. He, too, got to his feet.
+
+"I--I cannot trust myself to discuss this matter with you any further,
+Mr. Hodder. I feel too deeply--too strongly on the subject. I do not
+pretend to account for this astonishing transformation in your opinions.
+Up to the present I have deemed St. John's fortunate--peculiarly
+fortunate, in having you for its rector. I am bound to say I think you
+have not considered, in this change of attitude on your part, those
+who have made St. John's what it is, who through long and familiar
+association are bound to it by a thousand ties,--those who, like myself,
+have what may be called a family interest in this church. My father and
+mother were married here, I was baptized here. I think I may go so
+far as to add, Mr. Hodder, that this is our church, the church which a
+certain group of people have built in which to worship God, as was their
+right. Nor do I believe we can be reproached with a lack of hospitality
+or charity. We maintain this parish house, with its clubs; and at no
+small inconvenience to ourselves we have permitted the church to remain
+in this district. There is no better church music in this city, and we
+have a beautiful service in the evening at which, all pews are free. It
+is not unreasonable that we should have something to say concerning the
+doctrine to be preached here, that we should insist that that doctrine
+be in accordance with what we have always believed was the true doctrine
+as received by this Church."
+
+Up to this point Mr. Atterbury had had a feeling that he had not carried
+out with much distinction the programme which he had so carefully
+rehearsed on the way to the parish house. Hodder's poise had amazed and
+baffled him--he had expected to find the rector on the defensive. But
+now, burning anew with a sense of injustice, he had a sense at last of
+putting his case strongly.
+
+The feeling of triumph, however, was short lived. Hodder did not reply
+at once. So many seconds, indeed, went by that Mr. Atterbury began once
+more to grow slightly nervous under the strange gaze to which he was
+subjected. And when the clergyman' spoke there was no anger in his
+voice, but a quality--a feeling which was disturbing, and difficult to
+define.
+
+"You are dealing now, Mr. Atterbury," he said, "with the things of
+Caesar, not of God. This church belongs to God--not to you. But you
+have consecrated it to him. His truth, as Christ taught it, must not be
+preached to suit any man's convenience. When you were young you were not
+taught the truth--neither was I. It was mixed with adulterations which
+obscured and almost neutralized it. But I intend to face it now, and
+to preach it, and not the comfortable compromise which gives us the
+illusion that we are Christians because we subscribe to certain tenets,
+and permits us to neglect our Christian duties.
+
+"And since you have spoken of charity, let me assure you that there is
+no such thing as charity without the transforming, personal touch. It
+isn't the bread or instruction or amusement we give people vicariously,
+but the effect of our gift--even if that gift be only a cup of cold
+water--in illuminating and changing their lives. And it will avail
+any church little to have a dozen settlement houses while her members
+acquiesce in a State which refuses to relieve her citizens from sickness
+and poverty. Charity bends down only to lift others up. And with all our
+works, our expenditure and toil, how many have we lifted up?"
+
+Gordon Atterbury's indignation got the better of him. For he was the
+last man to behold with patience the shattering of his idols.
+
+"I think you have cast an unwarranted reflection on those who have built
+and made this church what it is, Mr. Hodder," he exclaimed. "And that
+you will find there are in it many--a great many earnest Christians
+who were greatly shocked by the words you spoke yesterday, who will not
+tolerate any interference with their faith. I feel it my duty to speak
+frankly, Mr Hodder, disagreeable though it be, in view of our former
+relations. I must tell you that I am not alone in the opinion that you
+should resign. It is the least you can do, in justice to us, in justice
+to yourself. There are other bodies--I cannot call them churches--which
+doubtless would welcome your liberal, and I must add atrophying,
+interpretation of Christianity. And I trust that reflection will
+convince you of the folly of pushing this matter to the extreme. We
+should greatly deplore the sensational spectacle of St. John's being
+involved in an ecclesiastical trial, the unpleasant notoriety into which
+it would bring a church hitherto untouched by that sort of thing. And I
+ought to tell you that I, among others, am about to send an Information
+to the bishop."
+
+Gordon Atterbury hesitated a moment, but getting no reply save an
+inclination of the head, took up his hat.
+
+"Ahem--I think that is all I have to say, Mr. Hodder. Good morning."
+
+Even then Hodder did not answer, but rose and held open the door. As
+he made his exit under the strange scrutiny of the clergyman's gaze the
+little vestryman was plainly uncomfortable. He cleared his throat once
+more, halted, and then precipitately departed.
+
+Hodder went to the window and thoughtfully watched the hurrying figure
+of Mr. Atterbury until it disappeared, almost skipping, around the
+corner .... The germ of truth, throughout the centuries, had lost
+nothing of its dynamic potentialities. If released and proclaimed it
+was still powerful enough to drive the world to insensate anger and
+opposition....
+
+As he stood there, lost in reflection, a shining automobile drew up at
+the curb, and from it descended a firm lady in a tight-fitting suit whom
+he recognized as Mrs Wallis Plimpton. A moment later she had invaded
+the office--for no less a word may be employed to express her physical
+aggressiveness, the glowing health which she radiated.
+
+"Good morning, Mr. Hodder," she said, seating herself in one of the
+straight-backed chairs. "I have been so troubled since you preached that
+sermon yesterday, I could scarcely sleep. And I made up my mind I'd
+come to you the first thing this morning. Mr. Plimpton and I have been
+discussing it. In fact, people are talking of nothing else. We dined
+with the Laureston Greys last night, and they, too, were full of it."
+Charlotte Plimpton looked at him, and the flow of her words suddenly
+diminished. And she added, a little lamely for her, "Spiritual matters
+in these days are so difficult, aren't they?"
+
+"Spiritual matters always were difficult, Mrs. Plimpton," he said.
+
+"I suppose so," she assented hurriedly, with what was intended for a
+smile. "But what I came to ask you is this--what are we to teach our
+children?"
+
+"Teach them the truth," the rector replied.
+
+"One of the things which troubled me most was your reference to modern
+criticism," she went on, recovering her facility. "I was brought up to
+believe that the Bible was true. The governess--Miss Standish, you know,
+such a fine type of Englishwoman--reads the children Bible stories
+every Sunday evening. They adore them, and little Wallis can repeat them
+almost by heart--the pillar of cloud by day, Daniel in the lions' den,
+and the Wise Men from the East. If they aren't true, some one ought to
+have told us before now."
+
+A note of injury had crept into her voice.
+
+"How do you feel about these things yourself?" Holder inquired.
+
+"How do I feel? Why, I have never thought about them very much--they
+were there, in the Bible!"
+
+"You were taught to believe them?"
+
+"Of course," she exclaimed, resenting what seemed a reflection on the
+Gore orthodoxy.
+
+"Do they in any manner affect your conduct?"
+
+"My conduct?" she repeated. "I don't know what you mean. I was brought
+up in the church, and Mr. Plimpton has always gone, and we are bringing
+up the children to go. Is that what you mean?"
+
+"No," Hodder answered, patiently, "that is not what I mean. I ask
+whether these stories in any way enter into your life, become part of
+you, and tend to make you a more useful woman?"
+
+"Well--I have never considered them in that way," she replied, a little
+perplexed.
+
+"Do you believe in them yourself?"
+
+"Why--I don't know,--I've never thought. I don't suppose I do,
+absolutely--not in those I have mentioned."
+
+"And you think it right to teach things to your children which you do
+not yourself believe?"
+
+"How am I to decide?" she demanded.
+
+"First by finding out yourself what you do believe," he replied, with a
+touch of severity.
+
+"Mr. Hodder!" she cried in a scandalized voice, "do you mean to say
+that I, who have been brought up in this church, do not know what
+Christianity is."
+
+He looked at her and shook his head.
+
+"You must begin by being honest with yourself," he went on, not heeding
+her shocked expression. "If you are really in earnest in this matter,
+I should be glad to help you all I can. But I warn you there is no
+achievement in the world more difficult than that of becoming a
+Christian. It means a conversion of your whole being something which you
+cannot now even imagine. It means a consuming desire which,--I fear,--in
+consideration of your present mode of life, will be difficult to
+acquire."
+
+"My present mode of life!" she gasped.
+
+"Precisely," said the rector. He was silent, regarding, her. There was
+discernible not the slightest crack of crevice in the enamel of this
+woman's worldly armour.
+
+For the moment her outraged feelings were forgotten. The man had
+fascinated her. To be told, in this authoritative manner, that she was
+wicked was a new and delightful experience. It brought back to her the
+real motive of her visit, which had in reality been inspired not only by
+the sermon of the day before, but by sheer curiosity.
+
+"What would you have me do?" she demanded.
+
+"Find yourself."
+
+"Do you mean to say that I am not--myself?" she asked, now completely
+bewildered.
+
+"I mean to say that you are nobody until you achieve conviction."
+
+For Charlotte Plimpton, nee Gore, to be told in her own city, by the
+rector of her own church that she was nobody was an event hitherto
+inconceivable! It was perhaps as extraordinary that she did not resent.
+it. Curiosity still led her on.
+
+"Conviction?" she repeated. "But I have conviction, Mr. Hodder. I
+believe in the doctrines of the Church."
+
+"Belief!" he exclaimed, and checked himself strongly. "Conviction
+through feeling. Not until then will you find what you were put in the
+world for."
+
+"But my husband--my children? I try to do my duty."
+
+"You must get a larger conception of it," Hodder replied.
+
+"I suppose you mean," she declared, "that I am to spend the rest of my
+life in charity."
+
+"How you would spend the rest of your life would be revealed to you,"
+said the rector.
+
+It was the weariness in his tone that piqued her now, the intimation
+that he did not believe in her sincerity--had not believed in it from
+the first. The life-long vanity of a woman used to be treated with
+consideration, to be taken seriously, was aroused. This extraordinary
+man had refused to enter into the details which she inquisitively
+craved.
+
+Charlotte Plimpton rose.
+
+"I shall not bother you any longer at present, Mr. Hodder," she said
+sweetly. "I know you must have, this morning especially, a great deal to
+trouble you."
+
+He met her scrutiny calmly.
+
+"It is only the things we permit to trouble us that do so, Mrs.
+Plimpton," he replied. "My own troubles have arisen largely from a lack
+of faith on the part of those whom I feel it is my duty to influence."
+
+It was then she delivered her parting shot, which she repeated, with
+much satisfaction, to her husband that evening. She had reached the
+door. "Was there a special service at Calvary yesterday?" she asked
+innocently, turning back.
+
+"Not that I know of."
+
+"I wondered. Mr. Parr was there; I'm told--and he's never been known to
+desert St. John's except on the rarest occasions. But oh, Mr. Hodder, I
+must congratulate you on your influence with Alison. When she has been
+out here before she never used to come to church at all."
+
+
+
+
+Volume 7.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII. THE CHOICE
+
+
+I
+
+Pondering over Alison's note, he suddenly recalled and verified some
+phrases which had struck him that summer on reading Harnack's celebrated
+History of Dogma, and around these he framed his reply. "To act as if
+faith in eternal life and in the living Christ was the simplest thing in
+the world, or a dogma to which one has to submit, is irreligious... It
+is Christian to pray that God would give the Spirit to make us strong
+to overcome the feelings and the doubts of nature... Where this faith,
+obtained in this way, exists, it has always been supported by the
+conviction that the Man lives who brought life and immortality to
+light. To hold fast this faith is the goal of life, for only what we
+consciously strive for is in this matter our own. What we think we
+possess is very soon lost."
+
+"The feelings and the doubts of nature!" The Divine Discontent, the
+striving against the doubt that every honest soul experiences and
+admits. Thus the contrast between her and these others who accepted and
+went their several ways was brought home to him.
+
+He longed to talk to her, but his days were full. Yet the very thought
+of her helped to bear him up as his trials, his problems accumulated;
+nor would he at any time have exchanged them for the former false peace
+which had been bought (he perceived more and more clearly) at the price
+of compromise.
+
+The worst of these trials, perhaps, was a conspicuous article in
+a newspaper containing a garbled account of his sermon and of the
+sensation it had produced amongst his fashionable parishioners. He
+had refused to see the reporter, but he had been made out a hero, a
+socialistic champion of the poor. The black headlines were nauseating;
+and beside them, in juxtaposition, were pen portraits of himself and of
+Eldon Parr. There were rumours that the banker had left the church until
+the recalcitrant rector should be driven out of it; the usual long list
+of Mr. Parr's benefactions was included, and certain veiled paragraphs
+concerning his financial operations. Mr. Ferguson, Mr. Plimpton, Mr.
+Constable, did not escape,--although they, too, had refused to be
+interviewed....
+
+The article brought to the parish house a bevy of reporters who had
+to be fought off, and another batch of letters, many of them from
+ministers, in approval or condemnation.
+
+His fellow-clergymen called, some to express sympathy and encouragement,
+more of them to voice in person indignant and horrified protests. Dr.
+Annesley of Calvary--a counterpart of whose rubicund face might
+have been found in the Council of Trent or in mediaeval
+fish-markets--pronounced his anathemas with his hands folded comfortably
+over his stomach, but eventually threw to the winds every vestige of his
+ecclesiastical dignity....
+
+Then there came a note from the old bishop, who was traveling. A kindly
+note, withal, if non-committal,--to the effect that he had received
+certain communications, but that his physician would not permit him
+to return for another ten days or so. He would then be glad to see Mr.
+Holder and talk with him.
+
+What would the bishop do? Holder's relations with him had been more than
+friendly, but whether the bishop's views were sufficiently liberal to
+support him in the extreme stand he had taken he could not surmise. For
+it meant that the bishop, too, must enter into a conflict with the first
+layman of his diocese, of whose hospitality he had so often partaken,
+whose contributions had been on so lordly a scale. The bishop was in
+his seventieth year, and had hitherto successfully fought any attempt to
+supply him with an assistant,--coadjutor or suffragan.
+
+At such times the fear grew upon Hodder that he might be recommended for
+trial, forced to abandon his fight to free the Church from the fetters
+that bound her: that the implacable hostility of his enemies would rob
+him of his opportunity.
+
+Thus ties were broken, many hard things were said and brought to his
+ears. There were vacancies in the classes and guilds, absences that
+pained him, silences that wrung him....
+
+Of all the conversations he held, that with Mrs. Constable was perhaps
+the most illuminating and distressing. As on that other occasion, when
+he had gone to her, this visit was under the seal of confession, unknown
+to her husband. And Hodder had been taken aback, on seeing her enter his
+office, by the very tragedy in her face--the tragedy he had momentarily
+beheld once before. He drew up a chair for her, and when she had sat
+down she gazed at him some moments without speaking.
+
+"I had to come," she said; "there are some things I feel I must ask you.
+For I have been very miserable since I heard you on Sunday."
+
+He nodded gently.
+
+"I knew that you would change your views--become broader, greater. You
+may remember that I predicted it."
+
+"Yes," he said.
+
+"I thought you would grow more liberal, less bigoted, if you will allow
+me to say so. But I didn't anticipate--" she hesitated, and looked up at
+him again.
+
+"That I would take the extreme position I have taken," he assisted her.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Hodder," she cried impulsively, "was it necessary to go so far?
+and all at once. I am here not only because I am miserable, but I am
+concerned on your account. You hurt me very much that day you came to
+me, but you made me your friend. And I wonder if you really understand
+the terrible, bitter feeling you have aroused, the powerful enemies you
+have made by speaking so--so unreservedly?"
+
+"I was prepared for it," he answered. "Surely, Mrs. Constable, once I
+have arrived at what I believe to be the truth, you would not have me
+temporize?"
+
+She gave him a wan smile.
+
+"In one respect, at least, you have not changed," she told him. "I am
+afraid you are not the temporizing kind. But wasn't there,--mayn't there
+still be a way to deal with this fearful situation? You have made it
+very hard for us--for them. You have given them no loophole of escape.
+And there are many, like me, who do not wish to see your career ruined,
+Mr. Hodder."
+
+"Would you prefer," he asked, "to see my soul destroyed? And your own?"
+
+Her lips twitched.
+
+"Isn't there any other way but that? Can't this transformation, which
+you say is necessary and vital, come gradually? You carried me away as
+I listened to you, I was not myself when I came out of the church. But
+I have been thinking ever since. Consider my husband, Mr. Hodder," her
+voice faltered. "I shall not mince matters with you--I know you will not
+pretend to misunderstand me. I have never seen him so upset since
+since that time Gertrude was married. He is in a most cruel position.
+I confessed to you once that Mr. Parr had made for us all the money we
+possess. Everett is fond of you, but if he espouses your cause, on the
+vestry, we shall be ruined."
+
+Hodder was greatly moved.
+
+"It is not my cause, Mrs. Constable," he said.
+
+"Surely, Christianity is not so harsh and uncompromising as that! And do
+you quite do justice to--to some of these men? There was no one to tell
+them the wrongs they were committing--if they were indeed wrongs. Our
+civilization is far from perfect."
+
+"The Church may have been remiss, mistaken," the rector replied. "But
+the Christianity she has taught, adulterated though it were, has never
+condoned the acts which have become commonplace in modern finance. There
+must have been a time, in the life of every one of these men, when they
+had to take that first step against which their consciences revolted,
+when they realized that fraud and taking advantage of the ignorant and
+weak were wrong. They have deliberately preferred gratification in this
+life to spiritual development--if indeed they believe in any future
+whatsoever. For 'whosoever will save his life shall lose it' is as true
+to-day as it ever was. They have had their choice--they still have it."
+
+"I am to blame," she cried. "I drove my husband to it, I made him think
+of riches, it was I who cultivated Mr. Parr. And oh, I suppose I am
+justly punished. I have never been happy for one instant since that
+day."
+
+He watched her, pityingly, as she wept. But presently she raised her
+face, wonderingly.
+
+"You do believe in the future life after--after what you have been
+through?"
+
+"I do," he answered simply.
+
+"Yes--I am sure you do. It is that, what you are, convinces me you do.
+Even the remarkable and sensible explanation you gave of it when
+you interpreted the parable of the talents is not so powerful as
+the impression that you yourself believe after thinking it out for
+yourself--not accepting the old explanations. And then," she added, with
+a note as of surprise, "you are willing to sacrifice everything for it!"
+
+"And you?" he asked. "Cannot you, too, believe to that extent?"
+
+"Everything?" she repeated. "It would mean--poverty. No--God help me--I
+cannot face it. I have become too hard. I cannot do without the world.
+And even if I could! Oh, you cannot know what you ask Everett, my
+husband--I must say it, you make me tell you everything--is not free.
+He is little better than a slave to Eldon Parr. I hate Eldon Parr," she
+added, with startling inconsequence.
+
+"If I had only known what it would lead to when I made Everett what
+he is! But I knew nothing of business, and I wanted money, position to
+satisfy my craving at the loss of--that other thing. And now I couldn't
+change my husband if I would. He hasn't the courage, he hasn't the
+vision. What there was of him, long ago, has been killed--and I killed
+it. He isn't--anybody, now."
+
+She relapsed again into weeping.
+
+"And then it might not mean only poverty--it might mean disgrace."
+
+"Disgrace!" the rector involuntarily took up the word.
+
+"There are some things he has done," she said in a low voice, "which he
+thought he was obliged to do which Eldon Parr made him do."
+
+"But Mr. Parr, too--?" Hodder began.
+
+"Oh, it was to shield Eldon Parr. They could never be traced to him. And
+if they ever came out, it would kill my husband. Tell me," she implored,
+"what can I do? What shall I do? You are responsible. You have made me
+more bitterly unhappy than ever."
+
+"Are you willing," he asked, after a moment, "to make the supreme
+renunciation? to face poverty, and perhaps disgrace, to save your soul
+and others?"
+
+"And--others?"
+
+"Yes. Your sacrifice would not, could not be in vain. Otherwise I should
+be merely urging on you the individualism which you once advocated with
+me."
+
+"Renunciation." She pronounced the word questioningly. "Can Christianity
+really mean that--renunciation of the world? Must we take it in the
+drastic sense of the Church of the early centuries-the Church of the
+Martyrs?"
+
+"Christianity demands all of us, or nothing," he replied. "But the false
+interpretation of renunciation of the early Church has cast its blight
+on Christianity even to our day. Oriental asceticism, Stoicism, Philo
+and other influences distorted Christ's meaning. Renunciation does not
+mean asceticism, retirement from the world, a denial of life. And the
+early Christian, since he was not a citizen, since he took the view that
+this mortal existence was essentially bad and kept his eyes steadfastly
+fixed on another, was the victim at once of false philosophies and of
+the literal messianic prophecies of the Jews, which were taken over with
+Christianity. The earthly kingdom which was to come was to be the result
+of some kind of a cataclysm. Personally, I believe our Lord merely used
+the Messianic literature as a convenient framework for his spiritual
+Kingdom of heaven, and that the Gospels misinterpret his meaning on this
+point.
+
+"Renunciation is not the withdrawal from, the denial of life, but the
+fulfilment of life, the submission to the divine will and guidance in
+order that our work may be shown us. Renunciation is the assumption,
+at once, of heavenly and earthly citizenship, of responsibility for
+ourselves and our fellow-men. It is the realization that the other
+world, the inner, spiritual world, is here, now, and that the soul may
+dwell in it before death, while the body and mind work for the coming of
+what may be called the collective kingdom. Life looked upon in that way
+is not bad, but good,--not meaningless, but luminous."
+
+She had listened hungrily, her eyes fixed upon his face.
+
+"And for me?" she questioned.
+
+"For you," he answered, leaning forward and speaking with a conviction
+that shook her profoundly, "if you make the sacrifice of your present
+unhappiness, of your misery, all will be revealed. The labour which you
+have shirked, which is now hidden from you, will be disclosed, you
+will justify your existence by taking your place as an element of the
+community. You will be able to say of yourself, at last, 'I am of use.'"
+
+"You mean--social work?"
+
+The likeness of this to Mrs. Plimpton's question struck him. She had
+called it "charity." How far had they wandered in their teaching from
+the Revelation of the Master, since it was as new and incomprehensible
+to these so-called Christians as to Nicodemus himself!
+
+"All Christian work is social, Mrs. Constable, but it is founded on
+love. 'Thou shaft love thy neighbour as thyself.' You hold your own soul
+precious, since it is the shrine of God. And for that reason you hold
+equally precious your neighbour's soul. Love comes first, as revelation,
+as imparted knowledge, as the divine gist of autonomy--self-government.
+And then one cannot help working, socially, at the task for which we are
+made by nature most efficient. And in order to discover what that task
+is, we must wait."
+
+"Why did not some one tell me this, when I was young?" she asked--not
+speaking to him. "It seems so simple."
+
+"It is simple. The difficult thing is to put it into practice--the most
+difficult thing in the world. Both courage and faith are required,
+faith that is content to trust as to the nature of the reward. It is the
+wisdom of foolishness. Have you the courage?"
+
+She pressed her hands together.
+
+"Alone--perhaps I should have. I don't know. But my husband! I was able
+to influence him to his destruction, and now I am powerless. Darkness
+has closed around me. He would not--he will not listen to me."
+
+"You have tried?"
+
+"I have attempted to talk to him, but the whole of my life contradicts
+my words. He cannot see me except as, the woman who drove him into
+making money. Sometimes I think he hates me."
+
+Hodder recalled, as his eyes rested on her compassionately, the
+sufferings of that other woman in Dalton Street.
+
+"Would you have me desert him--after all these years?" she whispered. "I
+often think he would be happier, even now."
+
+"I would have you do nothing save that which God himself will reveal to
+you. Go home, go into the church and pray--pray for knowledge. I think
+you will find that you are held responsible for your husband. Pray that
+that which you have broken, you may mend again."
+
+"Do you think there is a chance?"
+
+Hodder made a gesture.
+
+"God alone can judge as to the extent of his punishments."
+
+She got to her feet, wearily.
+
+"I feel no hope--I feel no courage, but--I will try. I see what you
+mean--that my punishment is my powerlessness."
+
+He bent his head.
+
+"You are so strong--perhaps you can help me."
+
+"I shall always be ready," he replied.
+
+He escorted her down the steps to the dark blue brougham with
+upstanding, chestnut horses which was waiting at the curb. But Mrs.
+Constable turned to the footman, who held open the door.
+
+"You may stay here awhile," she said to him, and gave Hodder her
+hand....
+
+She went into the church....
+
+
+
+II
+
+Asa Waring and his son-in-law, Phil Goodrich, had been to see Hodder on
+the subject of the approaching vestry meeting, and both had gone away
+not a little astonished and impressed by the calmness with which the
+rector looked forward to the conflict. Others of his parishioners, some
+of whom were more discreet in their expressions of sympathy, were no
+less surprised by his attitude; and even his theological adversaries,
+such as Gordon Atterbury, paid him a reluctant tribute. Thanks, perhaps,
+to the newspaper comments as much as to any other factor, in the
+minds of those of all shades of opinion in the parish the issue had
+crystallized into a duel between the rector and Eldon Parr. Bitterly
+as they resented the glare of publicity into which St. John's had
+been dragged, the first layman of the diocese was not beloved; and the
+fairer-minded of Hodder's opponents, though appalled, were forced to
+admit in their hearts that the methods by which Mr. Parr had made his
+fortune and gained his ascendency would not bear scrutiny.... Some of
+them were disturbed, indeed, by the discovery that there had come about
+in them, by imperceptible degrees, in the last few years a new and
+critical attitude towards the ways of modern finance: moat of them had
+an uncomfortable feeling that Hodder was somehow right,--a feeling
+which they sought to stifle when they reflected upon the consequences
+of facing it. For this would mean a disagreeable shaking up of their own
+lives. Few of them were in a position whence they might cast stones at
+Eldon Parr....
+
+What these did not grasp was the fact that that which they felt stirring
+within them was the new and spiritual product of the dawning twentieth
+century--the Social Conscience. They wished heartily that the new rector
+who had developed this disquieting personality would peacefully resign
+and leave them to the former, even tenor of their lives. They did not
+for one moment doubt the outcome of his struggle with Eldon Parr. The
+great banker was known to be relentless, his name was synonymous with
+victory. And yet, paradoxically, Hodder compelled their inner sympathy
+and admiration!...
+
+Some of them, who did not attempt peremptorily to choke the a processes
+made the startling discovery that they were not, after all, so shocked
+by his doctrines as they had at first supposed. The trouble was that
+they could not continue to listen to him, as formerly, with comfort....
+One thing was certain, that they had never expected to look forward to a
+vestry meeting with such breathless interest and anxiety. This clergyman
+had suddenly accomplished the surprising feat of reviving the Church as
+a burning, vital factor in the life of the community! He had discerned
+her enemy, and defied his power....
+
+As for Hodder, so absorbed had he been by his experiences, so wrung by
+the human contacts, the personal problems which he had sought to enter,
+that he had actually given no thought to the battle before him until the
+autumn afternoon, heavy with smoke, had settled down into darkness. The
+weather was damp and cold, and he sat musing on the ordeal now abruptly
+confronting him before his study fire when he heard a step behind him.
+He turned to recognize, by the glow of the embers, the heavy figure of
+Nelson Langmaid.
+
+"I hope I'm not disturbing you, Hodder," he said. "The janitor said you
+were in, and your door is open."
+
+"Not at all," replied the rector, rising. As he stood for a moment
+facing the lawyer, the thought of their friendship, and how it had begun
+in the little rectory overlooking the lake at Bremerton, was uppermost
+in his mind,--yes, and the memory of many friendly, literary discussions
+in the same room where they now stood, of pleasant dinners at Langmaid's
+house in the West End, when the two of them had often sat talking until
+late into the nights.
+
+"I must seem very inhospitable," said Hodder. "I'll light the lamp--it's
+pleasanter than the electric light."
+
+The added illumination at first revealed the lawyer in his familiar
+aspect, the broad shoulders, the big, reddish beard, the dome-like
+head,--the generous person that seemed to radiate scholarly benignity,
+peace, and good-will. But almost instantly the rector became aware of a
+new and troubled, puzzled glance from behind the round spectacles...
+
+"I thought I'd drop in a moment on my way up town--" he began. And the
+note of uncertainty in his voice, too, was new. Hodder drew towards
+the fire the big chair in which it had been Langmaid's wont to sit,
+and perhaps it was the sight of this operation that loosed the lawyer's
+tongue.
+
+"Confound it, Hodder!" he exclaimed, "I like you--I always have
+liked you. And you've got a hundred times the ability of the average
+clergyman. Why in the world did you have to go and make all this
+trouble?"
+
+By so characteristic a remark Hodder was both amused and moved. It
+revealed so perfectly the point of view and predicament of the
+lawyer, and it was also an expression of an affection which the rector
+cordially, returned.... Before answering, he placed his visitor in
+the chair, and the deliberation of the act was a revelation of the
+unconscious poise of the clergyman. The spectacle of this self-command
+on the brink of such a crucial event as the vestry meeting had taken
+Langmaid aback more than he cared to show. He had lost the old sense
+of comradeship, of easy equality; and he had the odd feeling of dealing
+with a new man, at once familiar and unfamiliar, who had somehow lifted
+himself out of the everyday element in which they heretofore had met.
+The clergyman had contrived to step out of his, Langmaid's, experience:
+had actually set him--who all his life had known no difficulty in
+dealing with men--to groping for a medium of communication....
+
+Hodder sat down on the other side of the fireplace. He, too, seemed to
+be striving for a common footing.
+
+"It was a question of proclaiming the truth when at last I came to see
+it, Langmaid. I could not help doing what I did. Matters of policy, of
+a false consideration for individuals could not enter into it. If this
+were not so, I should gladly admit that you had a just grievance, a
+peculiar right to demand why I had not remained the strictly orthodox
+person whom you induced to come here. You had every reason to
+congratulate yourself that you were getting what you doubtless would
+call a safe man."
+
+"I'll admit I had a twinge of uneasiness after I came home," Langmaid
+confessed.
+
+Hodder smiled at his frankness.
+
+"But that disappeared."
+
+"Yes, it disappeared. You seemed to suit 'em so perfectly. I'll own up,
+Hodder, that I was a little hurt that you did not come and talk to
+me just before you took the extraordinary--before you changed your
+opinions."
+
+"Would it have done any good?" asked the rector, gently. "Would you have
+agreed with me any better than you do now? I am perfectly willing,
+if you wish, to discuss with you any views of mine which you may not
+indorse. And it would make me very happy, I assure you, if I could bring
+you to look upon the matter as I do."
+
+This was a poser. And whether it were ingenuous, or had in it an element
+of the scriptural wisdom of the serpent, Langmaid could not have said.
+As a lawyer, he admired it.
+
+"I wasn't in church, as usual,--I didn't hear the sermon," he replied.
+"And I never could make head or tail of theology--I always told you
+that. What I deplore, Hodder, is that you've contrived to make a
+hornets' nest out of the most peaceful and contented congregation in
+America. Couldn't you have managed to stick to religion instead of
+getting mixed up with socialism?"
+
+"So you have been given the idea that my sermon was socialistic?" the
+rector said.
+
+"Socialistic and heretical,--it seems. Of course I'm not much of an
+authority on heresy, but they claim that you went out of your way to
+knock some of their most cherished and sacred beliefs in the head."
+
+"But suppose I have come to the honest conclusion that in the first
+place these so-called cherished beliefs have no foundation in fact, and
+no influence on the lives of the persons who cherished them, no real
+connection with Christianity? What would you have me do, as a man?
+Continue to preach them for the sake of the lethargic peace of which you
+speak? leave the church paralyzed, as I found it?"
+
+"Paralyzed! You've got the most influential people in the city."
+
+Hodder regarded him for a while without replying.
+
+"So has the Willesden Club," he said.
+
+Langmaid laughed a little, uncomfortably.
+
+"If Christianity, as one of the ancient popes is said to have remarked,
+were merely a profitable fable," the rector continued, "there might be
+something in your contention that St. John's, as a church, had reached
+the pinnacle of success. But let us ignore the spiritual side of this
+matter as non-vital, and consider it from the practical side. We have
+the most influential people in the city, but we have not their children.
+That does not promise well for the future. The children get more profit
+out of the country clubs. And then there is another question: is it
+going to continue to be profitable? Is it as profitable now as it was,
+say, twenty years ago?
+
+"You've got out of my depth," said Nelson Langmaid.
+
+"I'll try to explain. As a man of affairs, I think you will admit, if
+you reflect, that the return of St. John's, considering the large amount
+of money invested, is scarcely worth considering. And I am surprised
+that as astute a man as Mr. Pair has not been able to see this long
+ago. If we clear all the cobwebs away, what is the real function of this
+church as at present constituted? Why this heavy expenditure to maintain
+religious services for a handful of people? Is it not, when we come
+down to facts, an increasingly futile effort to bring the influences of
+religion--of superstition, if you will--to bear on the so-called lower
+classes in order that they may remain contented with their lot, with
+that station and condition in the world where--it is argued--it has
+pleased God to call them? If that were not so, in my opinion there are
+very few of the privileged classes who would invest a dollar in the
+Church. And the proof of it is that the moment a clergyman raises his
+voice to proclaim the true message of Christianity they are up in
+arms with the cry of socialism. They have the sense to see that their
+privileges are immediately threatened.
+
+"Looking at it from the financial side, it would be cheaper for them to
+close up their churches. It is a mere waste of time and money, because
+the influence on their less fortunate brethren in a worldly sense has
+dwindled to nothing. Few of the poor come near their churches in these
+days. The profitable fable is almost played out."
+
+Hodder had spoken without bitterness, yet his irony was by no means lost
+on the lawyer. Langmaid, if the truth be told, found himself for the
+moment in the unusual predicament of being at a loss, for the rector had
+put forward with more or less precision the very cynical view which he
+himself had been clever enough to evolve.
+
+"Haven't they the right," he asked, somewhat lamely, "to demand the kind
+of religion they pay for?"
+
+"Provided you don't call it religion," said the rector.
+
+Langmaid smiled in spite of himself.
+
+"See here, Hodder," he said, "I've always confessed frankly that I knew
+little or nothing about religion. I've come here this evening as your
+friend, without authority from anybody," he added significantly, "to see
+if this thing couldn't somehow be adjusted peaceably, for your sake as
+well as others'. Come, you must admit there's a grain of justice in the
+contention against you. When I went on to Bremerton to get you I had
+no real reason for supposing that these views would develop. I made a
+contract with you in all good faith."
+
+"And I with you," answered the rector. "Perhaps you do not realize,
+Langmaid, what has been the chief factor in developing these views."
+
+The lawyer was silent, from caution.
+
+"I must be frank with you. It was the discovery that Mr. Parr and
+others of my chief parishioners were so far from being Christians as to
+indulge, while they supported the Church of Christ, in operations like
+that of the Consolidated Tractions Company, wronging their fellow-men
+and condemning them to misery and hate. And that you, as a lawyer, used
+your talents to make that operation possible."
+
+"Hold on!" cried Langmaid, now plainly agitated. "You have no right--you
+can know nothing of that affair. You do not understand business."
+
+"I'm afraid," replied the rector, sadly, "that I understand one side of
+it only too well."
+
+"The Church has no right to meddle outside of her sphere, to dictate to
+politics and business."
+
+"Her sphere," said Holder, "--is the world. If she does not change the
+world by sending out Christians into it, she would better close her
+doors."
+
+"Well, I don't intend to quarrel with you, Holder. I suppose it can't be
+helped that we look at these things differently, and I don't intend
+to enter into a defence of business. It would take too long, and it
+wouldn't help any." He got to his feet. "Whatever happens, it won't
+interfere with our personal friendship, even if you think me a
+highwayman and I think you a--"
+
+"A fanatic," Holder supplied. He had risen, too, and stood, with a smile
+on his face, gazing at the lawyer with an odd scrutiny.
+
+"An idealist, I was going to say," Langmaid answered, returning the
+smile, "I'll admit that we need them in the world. It's only when one of
+them gets in the gear-box...."
+
+The rector laughed. And thus they stood, facing each other.
+
+"Langmaid," Holder asked, "don't you ever get tired and disgusted with
+the Juggernaut car?"
+
+The big lawyer continued to smile, but a sheepish, almost boyish
+expression came over his face. He had not credited the clergyman with so
+much astuteness.
+
+"Business, nowadays, is--business, Holder. The Juggernaut car claims us
+all. It has become-if you will permit me to continue to put my similes
+into slang--the modern band wagon. And we lawyers have to get on it, or
+fall by the wayside."
+
+Holder stared into the fire.
+
+"I appreciate your motive in coming here," he said, at length, "and I
+do you the justice of believing it was friendly, that the fact that you
+are, in a way, responsible for me to--to the congregation of St. John's
+did not enter into it. I realize that I have made matters particularly
+awkward for you. You have given them in me, and in good faith, something
+they didn't bargain for. You haven't said so, but you want me to resign.
+On the one hand, you don't care to see me tilting at the windmills, or,
+better, drawing down on my head the thunderbolts of your gods. On the
+other hand, you are just a little afraid for your gods. If the question
+in dispute were merely an academic one, I'd accommodate you at once. But
+I can't. I've thought it all out, and I have made up my mind that it
+is my clear duty to remain here and, if I am strong enough, wrest this
+church from the grip of Eldon Parr and the men whom he controls.
+
+"I am speaking plainly, and I understand the situation thoroughly. You
+will probably tell me, as others have done, that no one has ever opposed
+Eldon Parr who has not been crushed. I go in with my eyes open, I am
+willing to be crushed, if necessary. You have come here to warn me, and
+I appreciate your motive. Now I am going to warn you, in all sincerity
+and friendship. I may be beaten, I may be driven out. But the victory
+will be mine nevertheless. Eldon Parr and the men who stand with him in
+the struggle will never recover from the blow I shall give them. I shall
+leave them crippled because I have the truth on my side, and the truth
+is irresistible. And they shall not be able to injure me permanently.
+And you, I regret deeply to say, will be hurt, too. I beg you, for no
+selfish reason, to consider again the part you intend to play in this
+affair."
+
+Such was the conviction, such the unlooked-for fire with which the
+rector spoke that Langmaid was visibly shaken and taken aback in spite
+of himself.
+
+"Do you mean," he demanded, when he had caught his breath, "that you
+intend to attack us publicly?"
+
+"Is that the only punishment you can conceive of?" the rector asked. The
+reproach in his voice was in itself a denial.
+
+"I beg your pardon, Hodder," said the lawyer, quickly. "And I am sure
+you honestly believe what you say, but--"
+
+"In your heart you, too, believe it, Langmaid. The retribution has
+already begun. Nevertheless you will go on--for a while." He held out
+his hand, which Langmaid took mechanically. "I bear you no ill-will.
+I am sorry that you cannot yet see with sufficient clearness to save
+yourself."
+
+Langmaid turned and picked up his hat and stick and left the room
+without another word. The bewildered, wistful look which had replaced
+the ordinarily benign and cheerful expression haunted Hodder long after
+the lawyer had gone. It was the look of a man who has somehow lost his
+consciousness of power.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV. THE VESTRY MEETS
+
+At nine o'clock that evening Hodder stood alone in the arched vestry
+room, and the sight of the heavy Gothic chairs ranged about the long
+table brought up memories of comfortable, genial meetings prolonged by
+chat and banter.... The noise of feet, of subdued voices beside the coat
+room in the corridor, aroused him. All of the vestry would seem to have
+arrived at once.
+
+He regarded them with a detached curiosity as they entered, reading them
+with a new insight. The trace of off-handedness in Mr. Plimpton's former
+cordiality was not lost upon him--an intimation that his star had set.
+Mr. Plimpton had seen many breaches healed--had healed many himself. But
+he had never been known as a champion of lost causes.
+
+"Well, here we are, Mr. Hodder, on the stroke," he remarked. "As a
+vestry, I think we're entitled to the first prize for promptness. How
+about it, Everett?"
+
+Everett Constable was silent.
+
+"Good evening, Mr. Hodder," he said. He did not offer to shake hands,
+as Mr. Plimpton had done, but sat down at the far end of the table.
+He looked tired and worn; sick, the rector thought, and felt a sudden
+swelling of compassion for the pompous little man whose fibre was not
+as tough as that of these other condottieri: as Francis Ferguson's, for
+instance, although his soft hand and pink and white face framed in the
+black whiskers would seem to belie any fibre whatever.
+
+Gordon Atterbury hemmed and hawed,--"Ah, Mr. Hodder," and seated himself
+beside Mr. Constable, in a chair designed to accommodate a portly
+bishop. Both of them started nervously as Asa Waring, holding his head
+high, as a man should who has kept his birthright, went directly to the
+rector.
+
+"I'm glad to see you, Mr. Hodder," he said, and turning defiantly,
+surveyed the room. There was an awkward silence. Mr. Plimpton edged
+a little nearer. The decree might have gone forth for Mr. Hodder's
+destruction, but Asa Waring was a man whose displeasure was not to be
+lightly incurred.
+
+"What's this I hear about your moving out of Hamilton Place, Mr. Waring?
+You'd better come up and take the Spaulding lot, in Waverley, across
+from us."
+
+"I am an old man, Mr. Plimpton," Asa Waring replied. "I do not move as
+easily as some other people in these days."
+
+Everett Constable produced his handkerchief and rubbed his nose
+violently. But Mr. Plimpton was apparently undaunted.
+
+"I have always said," he observed, "that there was something very fine
+in your sticking to that neighbourhood after your friends had gone.
+Here's Phil!"
+
+Phil Goodrich looked positively belligerent, and as he took his stand
+on the other side of Hodder his father-in-law smiled at him grimly. Mr.
+Goodrich took hold of the rector's arm.
+
+"I missed one or two meetings last spring, Mr. Hodder," he said, "but
+I'm going to be on hand after this. My father, I believe, never missed
+a vestry meeting in his life. Perhaps that was because they used to hold
+most of 'em at his house."
+
+"And serve port and cigars, I'm told," Mr. Plimpton put in.
+
+"That was an inducement, Wallis, I'll admit," answered Phil. "But there
+are even greater inducements now."
+
+In view of Phil Goodrich's well-known liking for a fight, this was too
+pointed to admit of a reply, but Mr. Plimpton was spared the attempt by
+the entrance of. Nelson Langmaid. The lawyer, as he greeted them, seemed
+to be preoccupied, nor did he seek to relieve the tension with his
+customary joke. A few moments of silence followed, when Eldon Parr was
+seen to be standing in the doorway, surveying them.
+
+"Good evening, gentlemen," he said coldly, and without more ado went to
+his customary chair, and sat down in it. Immediately followed a scraping
+of other chairs. There was a dominating quality about the man not to be
+gainsaid.
+
+The rector called the meeting to order....
+
+During the routine business none of the little asides occurred which
+produce laughter. Every man in the room was aware of the intensity of
+Eldon Parr's animosity, and yet he betrayed it neither by voice, look,
+or gesture. There was something uncanny in this self-control, this sang
+froid with which he was wont to sit at boards waiting unmoved for the
+time when he should draw his net about his enemies, and strangle them
+without pity. It got on Langmaid's nerves--hardened as he was to it. He
+had seen many men in that net; some had struggled, some had taken their
+annihilation stoically; honest merchants, freebooters, and brigands.
+Most of them had gone out, with their families, into that precarious
+border-land of existence in which the to-morrows are ever dreaded.
+
+Yet here, somehow, was a different case. Langmaid found himself going
+back to the days when his mother had taken him to church, and he could
+not bear to look at, Hodder. Since six o'clock that afternoon--had his
+companions but known it--he had passed through one of the worst periods
+of his existence....
+
+After the regular business had been disposed of a brief interval was
+allowed, for the sake of decency, to ensue. That Eldon Parr would not
+lead the charge in person was a foregone conclusion. Whom, then, would
+he put forward? For obvious reasons, not Wallis Plimpton or Langmaid,
+nor Francis Ferguson. Hodder found his, glance unconsciously fixed
+upon Everett Constable, who, moved nervously and slowly pushed back his
+chair. He was called upon, in this hour and in the church his father had
+helped to found, to make the supreme payment for the years of financial
+prosperity. Although a little man, with his shoulders thrown back and
+his head high, he generally looked impressive when he spoke, and his
+fine features and clear-cut English contributed to the effect. But now
+his face was strained, and his voice seemed to lack command as he bowed
+and mentioned the rector's name. Eldon Parr sat back.
+
+"Gentlemen," Mr. Constable began, "I feel it my duty to say something
+this evening, something that distresses me. Like some of you who are
+here present, I have been on this vestry for many years, and my father
+was on it before me. I was brought up under Dr. Gilman, of whom I need
+not speak. All here, except our present rector, knew him. This church,
+St. John's, has been a part--a--large part--of my life. And anything
+that seems to touch its welfare, touches me.
+
+"When Dr. Gilman died, after so many years of faithful service, we faced
+a grave problem,--that of obtaining a young man of ability, an active
+man who would be able to assume the responsibilities of a large and
+growing parish, and at the same time carry on its traditions, precious
+to us all; one who believed in and preached, I need scarcely add, the
+accepted doctrines of the Church, which we have been taught to think are
+sacred and necessary to salvation. And in the discovery of the Reverend
+Mr. Hodder, we had reason to congratulate ourselves and the parish.
+He was all that we had hoped for, and more. His sermons were at once a
+pleasure and an instruction.
+
+"I wish to make it clear," he continued, "that in spite of the pain Mr.
+Hodder's words of last Sunday have given me, I respect and honour him
+still, and wish him every success. But, gentlemen, I think it is plain
+to all of you that he has changed his religious convictions. As to the
+causes through which that change has come about, I do not pretend to
+know. To say the least, the transition is a startling one, one for which
+some of us were totally unprepared. To speak restrainedly, it was a
+shock--a shock which I shall remember as long as I live.
+
+"I need not go into the doctrinal question here, except to express my
+opinion that the fundamental facts of our religion were contradicted.
+And we have also to consider the effect of this preaching on coming
+generations for whom we are responsible. There are, no doubt, other
+fields for Mr. Hodder's usefulness. But I think it may safely be taken
+as a principle that this parish has the right to demand from the
+pulpit that orthodox teaching which suits it, and to which it has been
+accustomed. And I venture further to give it as my opinion--to put it
+mildly that others have been as disturbed and shocked as I. I have
+seen many, talked with many, since Sunday. For these reasons, with much
+sorrow and regret, I venture to suggest to the vestry that Mr. Hodder
+resign as our rector. And I may add what I believe to be the feeling
+of all present, that we have nothing but good will for him, although we
+think we might have been informed of what he intended to do.
+
+"And that in requesting him to resign we are acting for his own good as
+well as our own, and are thus avoiding a situation which threatens to
+become impossible,--one which would bring serious reflection on him
+and calamity on the church. We already, in certain articles in the
+newspapers, have had an indication of the intolerable notoriety we may
+expect, although I hold Mr. Hodder innocent in regard to those articles.
+I am sure he will have the good sense to see this situation as I see it,
+as the majority of the parish see it."
+
+Mr. Constable sat down, breathing hard. He had not looked at the rector
+during the whole of his speech, nor at Eldon Parr. There was a heavy
+silence, and then Philip Goodrich rose, square, clean-cut, aggressive.
+
+"I, too, gentlemen, have had life-long association with this church," he
+began deliberately. "And for Mr. Hodder's sake I am going to give you a
+little of my personal history, because I think it typical of thousands
+of men of my age all over this country. It was nobody's fault, perhaps,
+that I was taught that the Christian religion depended on a certain
+series of nature miracles and a chain of historical events, and when I
+went East to school I had more of this same sort of instruction. I have
+never, perhaps, been overburdened with intellect, but the time arrived
+nevertheless when I began to think for myself. Some of the older boys
+went once, I remember, to the rector of the school--a dear old man--and
+frankly stated our troubles. To use a modern expression, he stood pat on
+everything. I do not say it was a consciously criminal act, he probably
+saw no way out himself. At any rate, he made us all agnostics at one
+stroke.
+
+"What I learned in college of science and history and philosophy merely
+confirmed me in my agnosticism. As a complete system for the making of
+atheists and materialists, I commend the education which I received. If
+there is any man here who believes religion to be an essential factor
+in life, I ask him to think of his children or grandchildren before he
+comes forward to the support of Mr. Constable.
+
+"In that sermon which he preached last Sunday, Mr. Hodder, for the first
+time in my life, made Christianity intelligible to me. I want him to
+know it. And there are other men and women in that congregation who
+feel as I do. Gentlemen, there is nothing I would not give to have had
+Christianity put before me in that simple and inspiring way when I was a
+boy. And in my opinion St. John's is more fortunate to-day than it
+ever has been in its existence. Mr. Hodder should have an unanimous
+testimonial of appreciation from this vestry for his courage. And if the
+vote requesting him to resign prevails, I venture to predict that there
+is not a man on this vestry who will not live to regret it."
+
+Phil Goodrich glared at Eldon Parr, who remained unmoved.
+
+"Permit me to add," he said, "that this controversy, in other respects
+than doctrine, is more befitting to the Middle Ages than to the
+twentieth century, when this Church and other denominations are passing
+resolutions in their national conventions with a view to unity and
+freedom of belief."
+
+Mr. Langmaid, Mr. Plimpton, and Mr. Constable sat still. Mr. Ferguson
+made no move. It was Gordon Atterbury who rushed into the breach, and
+proved that the extremists are allies of doubtful value.
+
+He had, apparently, not been idle since Sunday, and was armed cap-a pie
+with time-worn arguments that need not be set down. All of which went to
+show that Mr. Goodrich had not referred to the Middle Ages in vain. For
+Gordon Atterbury was a born school-man. But he finished by declaring, at
+the end of twenty minutes (much as he regretted the necessity of saying
+it), that Mr. Hodder's continuance as rector would mean the ruin of the
+church in which all present took such a pride. That the great majority
+of its members would never submit to what was so plainly heresy.
+
+It was then that Mr. Plimpton gathered courage to pour oil on the
+waters. There was nothing, in his opinion, he remarked smilingly, in
+his function as peacemaker, to warrant anything but the most friendly
+interchange of views. He was second to none in his regard for Mr.
+Hodder, in his admiration for a man who had the courage of his
+convictions. He had not the least doubt that Mr. Hodder did not desire
+to remain in the parish when it was so apparent that the doctrines which
+he now preached were not acceptable to most of those who supported
+the church. And he added (with sublime magnanimity) that he wished Mr.
+Hodder the success which he was sure he deserved, and gave him every
+assurance of his friendship.
+
+Asa Waring was about to rise, when he perceived that Hodder himself
+was on his feet. And the eyes of every man, save one, were fixed on him
+irresistibly. The rector seemed unaware of it. It was Philip Goodrich
+who remarked to his father-in-law, as they walked home afterwards, of
+the sense he had had at that moment that there were just two men in the
+room,--Hodder and Eldon Parr. All the rest were ciphers; all had lost,
+momentarily, their feelings of partisanship and were conscious only of
+these two intense, radiating, opposing centres of force; and no man,
+oddly enough, could say which was the stronger. They seemingly met on
+equal terms. There could not be the slightest doubt that the rector
+did not mean to yield, and yet they might have been puzzled if they had
+asked themselves how they had read the fact in his face or manner. For
+he betrayed neither anger nor impatience.
+
+No more did the financier reveal his own feelings. He still sat back in
+his chair, unmoved, in apparent contemplation. The posture was familiar
+to Langmaid.
+
+Would he destroy, too, this clergyman? For the first time in his life,
+and as he looked at Hodder, the lawyer wondered. Hodder did not defend
+himself, made no apologies. Christianity was not a collection of
+doctrines, he reminded them,--but a mode of life. If anything were clear
+to him, it was that the present situation was not, with the majority of
+them, a matter of doctrines, but of unwillingness to accept the message
+and precept of Jesus Christ, and lead Christian lives. They had made use
+of the doctrines as a stalking-horse.
+
+There was a stir at this, and Hodder paused a moment and glanced around
+the table. But no one interrupted.
+
+He was fully aware of his rights, and he had no intention of resigning.
+To resign would be to abandon the work for which he was responsible, not
+to them, but to God. And he was perfectly willing--nay, eager to defend
+his Christianity before any ecclesiastical court, should the bishop
+decide that a court was necessary. The day of freedom, of a truer vision
+was at hand, the day of Christian unity on the vital truths, and no
+better proof of it could be brought forward than the change in him. In
+his ignorance and blindness he had hitherto permitted compromise, but he
+would no longer allow those who made only an outward pretence of being
+Christians to direct the spiritual affairs of St. John's, to say what
+should and what should not be preached. This was to continue to paralyze
+the usefulness of the church, to set at naught her mission, to alienate
+those who most had need of her, who hungered and thirsted after
+righteousness, and went away unsatisfied.
+
+He had hardly resumed his seat when Everett Constable got up again. He
+remarked, somewhat unsteadily, that to prolong the controversy would be
+useless and painful to all concerned, and he infinitely regretted the
+necessity of putting his suggestion that the rector resign in the form
+of a resolution.... The vote was taken. Six men raised their hands in
+favour of his resignation--Nelson Langmaid among them: two, Asa Waring
+and Philip Goodrich, were against it. After announcing the result,
+Hodder rose.
+
+"For the reason I have stated, gentlemen, I decline to resign," he said.
+"I stand upon my canonical rights."
+
+Francis Ferguson arose, his voice actually trembling with anger. There
+is something uncanny in the passion of a man whose life has been ordered
+by the inexorable rules of commerce, who has been wont to decide all
+questions from the standpoint of dollars and cents. If one of his own
+wax models had suddenly become animated, the effect could not have been
+more startling.
+
+In the course of this discussion, he declared, Mr. Hodder had seen fit
+to make grave and in his opinion unwarranted charges concerning the
+lives of some, if not all, of the gentlemen who sat here. It surprised
+him that these remarks had not been resented, but he praised a Christian
+forbearance on the part of his colleagues which he was unable to
+achieve. He had no doubt that their object had been to spare Mr.
+Hodder's feelings as much as possible, but Mr. Hodder had shown no
+disposition to spare their own. He had outraged them, Mr. Ferguson
+thought,--wantonly so. He had made these preposterous and unchristian
+charges an excuse for his determination to remain in a position where
+his usefulness had ceased.
+
+No one, unfortunately, was perfect in this life,--not even Mr. Hodder.
+He, Francis Ferguson, was far from claiming to be so. But he believed
+that this arraignment of the men who stood highest in the city for
+decency, law, and order, who supported the Church, who revered its
+doctrines, who tried to live Christian lives, who gave their time and
+their money freely to it and to charities, that this arraignment was an
+arrogant accusation and affront to be repudiated. He demanded that Mr.
+Hodder be definite. If he had any charges to make, let him make them
+here and now.
+
+The consternation, the horror which succeeded such a stupid and
+unexpected tactical blunder on the part of the usually astute Mr.
+Ferguson were felt rather than visually discerned. The atmosphere might
+have been described as panicky. Asa Waring and Phil Goodrich smiled as
+Wallis Plimpton, after a moment's hush, scrambled to his feet, his
+face pale, his customary easiness and nonchalance now the result of an
+obvious effort. He, too, tried to smile, but swallowed instead as he
+remembered his property in Dalton Street.... Nelson Langmaid smiled,
+in spite of himself... Mr. Plimpton implored his fellow-members not to
+bring personalities into the debate, and he was aware all the while of
+the curious, pitying expression of the rector. He breathed a sigh of
+relief at the opening words of Hodder, who followed him.
+
+"Gentlemen," he said, "I have no intention of being personal, even
+by unanimous consent. But if Mr. Ferguson will come to me after this
+meeting I shall have not the least objection to discussing this matter
+with him in so far as he himself is concerned. I can only assure you now
+that I have not spoken without warrant."
+
+There was, oddly enough, no acceptance of this offer by Mr. Ferguson.
+Another silence ensued, broken, at last, by a voice for which they had
+all been unconsciously waiting; a voice which, though unemotional, cold,
+and matter-of-fact, was nevertheless commanding, and long accustomed to
+speak with an overwhelming authority. Eldon Parr did not rise.
+
+"Mr. Hodder," he said, "in one respect seems to be under the delusion
+that we are still in the Middle Ages, instead of the twentieth century,
+since he assumes the right to meddle with the lives of his parishioners,
+to be the sole judge of their actions. That assumption will not, be
+tolerated by free men. I, for one, gentlemen, do not, propose to have a
+socialist for the rector of the church which I attend and support. And
+I maintain the privilege of an American citizen to set my own standards,
+within the law, and to be the sole arbitrar of those standards."
+
+"Good!" muttered Gordon Atterbury. Langmaid moved uncomfortably.
+
+"I shall not waste words," the financier continued. "There is in my
+mind no question that we are justified in demanding from our rector the
+Christian doctrines to which we have given our assent, and which are
+stated in the Creeds. That they shall be subject to the whims of the
+rector is beyond argument. I do not pretend to, understand either,
+gentlemen, the nature of the extraordinary change that has taken place
+in the rector of St. John's. I am not well versed m psychology. I am
+incapable of flights myself. One effect of this change is an attitude on
+which reasonable considerations would seem to have no effect.
+
+"Our resources, fortunately, are not yet at an end. It has been my
+hope, on account of my former friendship with Mr. Hodder, that an
+ecclesiastical trial might not be necessary. It now seems inevitable.
+In the meantime, since Mr. Hodder has seen fit to remain in spite of
+our protest, I do not intend to enter this church. I was prepared,
+gentlemen, as some of you no doubt know, to spend a considerable sum in
+adding to the beauty of St. John's and to the charitable activities of
+the parish. Mr. Hodder has not disapproved of my gifts in the past,
+but owing to his present scruples concerning my worthiness, I naturally
+hesitate to press the matter now." Mr. Parr indulged in the semblance of
+a smile. "I fear that he must take the responsibility of delaying this
+benefit, with the other responsibilities he has assumed."
+
+His voice changed. It became sharper.
+
+"In short, I propose to withhold all contributions for whatever purpose
+from this church while Mr. Hodder is rector, and I advise those of you
+who have voted for his resignation to do the same. In the meantime, I
+shall give my money to Calvary, and attend its services. And I shall
+offer further a resolution--which I am informed is within our right--to
+discontinue Mr. Hodder's salary."
+
+There was that in the unparalleled audacity of Eldon Parr that compelled
+Hodder's unwilling admiration. He sat gazing at the financier during
+this speech, speculating curiously on the inner consciousness of the man
+who could utter it. Was it possible that he had no sense of guilt? Even
+so, he had shown a remarkable astuteness in relying on the conviction
+that he (Hodder) would not betray what he knew.
+
+He was suddenly aware that Asa Waring was standing beside him.
+
+"Gentlemen," said Mr. Waring, "I have listened to this discussion as
+long as I can bear it with patience. Had I been told of it, I should
+have thought it incredible that the methods of the money changers should
+be applied to the direction and control of the house of God. In my
+opinion there is but one word which is suitable for what has passed here
+to-night, and the word is persecution. Perhaps I have lived too long
+I have lived to see honourable, upright men deprived of what was
+rightfully theirs, driven from their livelihood by the rapacity of those
+who strive to concentrate the wealth and power of the nation into their
+hands. I have seen this power gathering strength, stretching its arm
+little by little over the institutions I fought to preserve, and which
+I cherish over our politics, over our government, yes, and even over
+our courts. I have seen it poisoning the business honour in which we
+formerly took such a pride, I have seen it reestablishing a slavery
+more pernicious than that which millions died to efface. I have seen
+it compel a subservience which makes me ashamed, as an American, to
+witness."
+
+His glance, a withering moral scorn, darted from under the grizzled
+eyebrows and alighted on one man after another, and none met it. Everett
+Constable coughed, Wallis Plimpton shifted his position, the others sat
+like stones. Asa Waring was giving vent at last to the pent-up feelings
+of many years.
+
+"And now that power, which respects nothing, has crept into the
+sanctuary of the Church. Our rector recognizes it, I recognize
+it,--there is not a man here who, in his heart, misunderstands me. And
+when a man is found who has the courage to stand up against it, I honour
+him with all my soul, and a hope that was almost dead revives in me. For
+there is one force, and one force alone, able to overcome the power of
+which I speak,--the Spirit of Christ. And the mission of the Church is
+to disseminate that spirit. The Church is the champion on which we
+have to rely, or give up all hope of victory. The Church must train the
+recruits. And if the Church herself is betrayed into the hands of the
+enemy, the battle is lost.
+
+"If Mr. Hodder is forced out of this church, it would be better to lock
+the doors. St. John's will be held up, and rightfully, to the scorn of
+the city. All the money in the world will not save her. Though crippled,
+she has survived one disgrace, when she would not give free shelter to
+the man who above all others expressed her true spirit, when she drove
+Horace Bentley from her doors after he had been deprived of the fortune
+which he was spending for his fellow-men. She will not survive another.
+
+"I have no doubt Mr. Parr's motion to take from Mr. Hodder his living
+will go through. And still I urge him not to resign. I am not a rich
+man, even when such property as I have is compared to moderate fortunes
+of these days, but I would pay his salary willingly out of my own pocket
+rather than see him go....
+
+"I call the attention of the Chairman," said Eldon Parr, after a certain
+interval in which no one had ventured to speak, "to the motion before
+the vestry relating to the discontinuance of Mr. Hodder's salary."
+
+It was then that the unexpected happened. Gordon Atterbury redeemed
+himself. His respect for Mr. Waring, he said, made him hesitate to take
+issue with him.
+
+He could speak for himself and for a number of people in the
+congregation when he reiterated his opinion that they were honestly
+shocked at what Mr. Hodder had preached, and that this was his sole
+motive in requesting Mr. Hodder to resign. He thought, under the
+circumstances, that this was a matter which might safely be left with
+the bishop. He would not vote to deprive Mr. Hodder of his salary.
+
+The motion was carried by a vote of five to three. For Eldon Parr well
+knew that his will needed no reenforcement by argument. And this much
+was to be said for him, that after he had entered a battle he never
+hesitated, never under any circumstances reconsidered the probable
+effect of his course.
+
+As for the others, those who had supported him, they were cast in a less
+heroic mould. Even Francis Ferguson. As between the devil and the deep
+sea, he was compelled, with as good a grace as possible, to choose the
+devil. He was utterly unable to contemplate the disaster which might
+ensue if certain financial ties, which were thicker than cables, were
+snapped. But his affection for the devil was not increased by thus being
+led into a charge from which he would willingly have drawn back. Asa
+Waring might mean nothing to Eldon Parr, but he meant a great deal
+to Francis Ferguson, who had by no means forgotten his sensations of
+satisfaction when Mrs. Waring had made her first call in Park Street
+on Francis Ferguson's wife. He left the room in such a state of
+absent-mindedness as actually to pass Mr. Parr in the corridor without
+speaking to him.
+
+The case of Wallis Plimpton was even worse. He had married the Gores,
+but he had sought to bind himself with hoops of steel to the Warings.
+He had always secretly admired that old Roman quality (which the
+Goodriches--their connections--shared) of holding fast to their
+course unmindful and rather scornful of influence which swayed their
+neighbours. The clan was sufficient unto itself, satisfied with a
+moderate prosperity and a continually increasing number of descendants.
+The name was unstained. Such are the strange incongruities in the
+hearts of men, that few realized the extent to which Wallis Plimpton
+had partaken of the general hero-worship of Phil Goodrich. He had
+assiduously cultivated his regard, at times discreetly boasted of it,
+and yet had never been sure of it. And now fate, in the form of his
+master, Eldon Parr had ironically compelled him at one stroke to undo
+the work of years. As soon as the meeting broke up, he crossed the room.
+
+"I can't tell you how much I regret this, Phil," he said. "Charlotte has
+very strong convictions, you know, and so have I. You can understand,
+I am sure, how certain articles of belief might be necessary to one
+person, and not to another."
+
+"Yes," said Phil, "I can understand. We needn't mention the articles,
+Wallis." And he turned his back.
+
+He never knew the pain he inflicted. Wallis Plimpton looked at the
+rector, who stood talking to Mr. Waring, and for the first time in his
+life recoiled from an overture.
+
+Something in the faces of both men warned him away.
+
+Even Everett Constable, as they went home in the cars together, was
+brief with him, and passed no comments when Mr. Plimpton recovered
+sufficiently to elaborate on the justification of their act, and upon
+the extraordinary stand taken by Phil Goodrich and Mr. Waring.
+
+"They might have told us what they were going to do."
+
+Everett Constable eyed him.
+
+"Would it have made any difference, Plimpton?" he demanded.
+
+After that they rode in silence, until they came to a certain West End
+corner, where they both descended. Little Mr. Constable's sensations
+were, if anything, less enviable, and he had not Mr. Plimpton's
+recuperative powers. He had sold that night, for a mess of pottage, the
+friendship and respect of three generations. And he had fought, for pay,
+against his own people.
+
+And lastly, there was Langmaid, whose feelings almost defy analysis. He
+chose to walk through the still night the four miles--that separated
+him from his home. And he went back over the years of his life until he
+found, in the rubbish of the past, a forgotten and tarnished jewel. The
+discovery pained him. For that jewel was the ideal he had carried away,
+as a youth, from the old law school at the bottom of Hamilton Place,--a
+gift from no less a man than the great lawyer and public-spirited
+citizen, Judge Henry Goodrich--Philip Goodrich's grandfather,
+whose seated statue marked the entrance of the library. He, Nelson
+Langmaid,--had gone forth from that school resolved to follow in the
+footsteps of that man,--but somehow he missed the path. Somehow
+the jewel had lost its fire. There had come a tempting offer, and
+a struggle--just one: a readjustment on the plea that the world had
+changed since the days of Judge Goodrich, whose uncompromising figure
+had begun to fade: an exciting discovery that he, Nelson Langmaid,
+possessed the gift of drawing up agreements which had the faculty of
+passing magically through the meshes of the Statutes. Affluence had
+followed, and fame, and even that high office which the Judge himself
+had held, the Presidency of the State Bar Association. In all that time,
+one remark, which he had tried to forget, had cut him to the quick.
+Bedloe Hubbell had said on the political platform that Langmaid got one
+hundred thousand dollars a year for keeping Eldon Parr out of jail.
+
+Once he stopped in the street, his mind suddenly going back to the
+action of the financier at the vestry meeting.
+
+"Confound him!" he said aloud, "he has been a fool for once. I told him
+not to do it."
+
+He stood at last in the ample vestibule of his house, singling out
+his latch-key, when suddenly the door opened, and his daughter Helen
+appeared.
+
+"Oh, dad," she cried, "why are you so-late? I've been watching for you.
+I know you've let Mr. Hodder stay."
+
+She gazed at him with widened eyes.
+
+"Don't tell me that you've made him resign. I can't--I won't believe
+it."
+
+"He isn't going to resign, Helen," Langmaid replied, in an odd voice.
+
+"He--he refused to."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV. "RISE, CROWNED WITH LIGHT!"
+
+
+I
+
+The Church of St. John's, after a peaceful existence of so many years,
+had suddenly become the stage on which rapid and bewildering dramas were
+played: the storm-centre of chaotic forces, hitherto unperceived, drawn
+from the atmosphere around her. For there had been more publicity, more
+advertising. "The Rector of St. John's will not talk"--such had been
+one headline: neither would the vestry talk. And yet, despite all this
+secrecy, the whole story of the suspension of Hodder's salary was in
+print, and an editorial (which was sent to him) from a popular and
+sensational journal, on "tainted money," in which Hodder was held up to
+the public as a martyr because he refused any longer to accept for the
+Church ill-gotten gains from Consolidated Tractions and the like.
+
+This had opened again the floodgates of the mails, and it seemed as
+though every person who had a real or fancied grievance against Eldon
+Parr had written him. Nor did others of his congregation escape. The
+press of visitors at the parish house suddenly increased once more, men
+and women came to pour into his ears an appalling aeries of confessions;
+wrongs which, like Garvin's, had engendered bitter hatreds; woes,
+temptations, bewilderments. Hodder strove to keep his feet, sought
+wisdom to deal patiently with all, though at times he was tried to the
+uttermost. And he held steadfastly before his mind the great thing, that
+they did come. It was what he had longed for, prayed for, despaired of.
+He was no longer crying in the empty wilderness, but at last in touch-in
+natural touch with life: with life in all its sorrow, its crudity and
+horror. He had contrived, by the grace of God, to make the connection
+for his church.
+
+That church might have been likened to a ship sailing out of the snug
+harbour in which she had lain so long to range herself gallantly beside
+those whom she had formerly beheld, with complacent cowardice, fighting
+her fight: young men and women, enlisted under other banners than
+her own, doing their part in the battle of the twentieth century for
+humanity. Her rector was her captain. It was he who had cut her cables,
+quelled, for a time at least, her mutineers; and sought to hearten
+those of her little crew who wavered, who shrank back appalled as they
+realized something of the immensity of the conflict in which her destiny
+was to be wrought out.
+
+To carry on the figure, Philip Goodrich might have been deemed her first
+officer. He, at least, was not appalled, but grimly conscious of the
+greatness of the task to which they had set their hands. The sudden
+transformation of conservative St. John's was no more amazing than that
+of the son of a family which had never been without influence in the
+community. But that influence had always been conservative. And Phil
+Goodrich had hitherto taken but a listless interest in the church of his
+fathers. Fortune had smiled upon him, trusts had come to him unsought.
+He had inherited the family talent for the law, the freedom to practise
+when and where he chose. His love of active sport had led him into many
+vacations, when he tramped through marsh and thicket after game, and at
+five and forty there was not an ounce of superfluous flesh on his hard
+body. In spite of his plain speaking, an overwhelming popularity at
+college had followed him to his native place, and no organization,
+sporting or serious, was formed in the city that the question was not
+asked, "What does Goodrich think about it?"
+
+His whole-souled enlistment in the cause of what was regarded as radical
+religion became, therefore, the subject of amazed comment in the
+many clubs he now neglected. The "squabble" in St. John's, as it was
+generally referred to, had been aired in the press, but such was the
+magic in a name made without conscious effort that Phil Goodrich's
+participation in the struggle had a palpably disarming effect: and
+there were not a few men who commonly spent their Sunday mornings behind
+plate-glass windows, surrounded by newspapers, as well as some in the
+athletic club (whose contests Mr. Goodrich sometimes refereed) who
+went to St. John's out of curiosity and who waited, afterwards, for
+an interview with Phil or the rector. The remark of one of these was
+typical of others. He had never taken much stock in religion, but if
+Goodrich went in for it he thought he'd go and look it over.
+
+Scarcely a day passed that Phil did not drop in at the parish house....
+And he set himself, with all the vigour of an unsquandered manhood, to
+help Hodder to solve the multitude of new problems by which they were
+beset.
+
+A free church was a magnificent ideal, but how was it to be carried on
+without an Eldon Parr, a Ferguson, a Constable, a Mrs. Larrabbee, or a
+Gore who would make up the deficit at the end of the year? Could weekly
+contributions, on the envelope system, be relied upon, provided the
+people continued to come and fill the pews of absent and outraged
+parishioners? The music was the most expensive in the city, although
+Mr. Taylor, the organist, had come to the rector and offered to cut his
+salary in half, and to leave that in abeyance until the finances could
+be adjusted. And his example had been followed by some of the high-paid
+men in the choir. Others had offered to sing without pay. And there were
+the expenses of the parish house, an alarming sum now Eldon Parr had
+withdrawn: the salaries of the assistants. Hodder, who had saved a
+certain sum in past years, would take nothing for the present.... Asa
+Waring and Phil Goodrich borrowed on their own responsibility...
+
+
+
+II
+
+Something of the overwhelming nature of the forces Hodder had summoned
+was visibly apparent on that first Sunday after what many had called
+his apostasy. Instead of the orderly, sprucely-dressed groups of people
+which were wont to linger in greetings before the doors of St. John's,
+a motley crowd thronged the pavement and streamed into the church,
+pressing up the aisles and invading the sacred precincts where decorous
+parishioners had for so many years knelt in comfort and seclusion. The
+familiar figure of Gordon Atterbury was nowhere to be seen, and the
+Atterbury pew was occupied by shop-girls in gaudy hats. Eldon Parr's pew
+was filled, Everett Constable's, Wallis Plimpton's; and the ushers
+who had hastily been mustered were awestricken and powerless. Such a
+resistless invasion by the hordes of the unknown might well have struck
+with terror some of those who hitherto had had the courage to
+standup loyally in the rector's support. It had a distinct flavour of
+revolution: contained, for some, a grim suggestion of a time when that
+vague, irresponsible, and restless monster, the mob, would rise in its
+might and brutally and inexorably take possession of all property.
+
+Alison had met Eleanor Goodrich in Burton Street, and as the two made
+their way into the crowded vestibule they encountered Martha Preston,
+whose husband was Alison's cousin, in the act of flight.
+
+"You're not going in!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Of course we are."
+
+Mrs. Preston stared at Alison in amazement.
+
+"I didn't know you were still here," she said, irrelevantly. "I'm pretty
+liberal, my dear, as you know,--but this is more than I can stand. Look
+at them!" She drew up her skirts as a woman brushed against her. "I
+believe in the poor coming to church, and all that, but this is mere
+vulgar curiosity, the result of all that odious advertising in the
+newspapers. My pew is filled with them. If I had stayed, I should have
+fainted. I don't know what to think of Mr. Hodder."
+
+"Mr. Hodder is not to blame for the newspapers," replied Alison, warmly.
+She glanced around her at the people pushing past, her eyes shining, her
+colour high, and there was the ring of passion in her voice which had do
+Martha Preston a peculiarly disquieting effect. "I think it's splendid
+that they are here at all! I don't care what brought them."
+
+Mrs. Preston stared again. She was a pretty, intelligent woman, at
+whose dinner table one was sure to hear the discussion of some "modern
+problem": she believed herself to be a socialist. Her eyes sought
+Eleanor Goodrich's, who stood by, alight with excitement.
+
+"But surely you, Eleanor-you're not going in! You'll never be able to
+stand it, even if you find a seat. The few people we know who've come
+are leaving. I just saw the Allan Pendletons."
+
+"Have you seen Phil?" Eleanor asked.
+
+"Oh, yes, he's in there, and even he's helpless. And as I came out poor
+Mr. Bradley was jammed up against the wall. He seemed perfectly
+stunned...."
+
+At this moment they were thrust apart. Eleanor quivered as she was
+carried through the swinging doors into the church.
+
+"I think you're right," she whispered to Alison, "it is splendid.
+There's something about it that takes hold of me, that carries one away.
+It makes me wonder how it can be guided--what will come of it?"
+
+They caught sight of Phil pushing his way towards them, and his face
+bore the set look of belligerency which Eleanor knew so well, but he
+returned her smile. Alison's heart warmed towards him.
+
+"What do you think of this?" he demanded. "Most of our respectable
+friends who dared to come have left in a towering rage--to institute
+lawsuits, probably. At tiny rate, strangers are not being made to wait
+until ten minutes after the service begins. That's one barbarous custom
+abolished."
+
+"Strangers seem to have taken matters in their own hands for once"
+Eleanor smiled. "We've made up our minds to stay, Phil, even if we have
+to stand."
+
+"That's the right spirit," declared her husband, glancing at Alison, who
+had remained silent, with approval and by no means a concealed surprise.
+"I think I know of a place where I can squeeze you in, near Professor
+Bridges and Sally, on the side aisle."
+
+"Are George and Sally here?" Eleanor exclaimed.
+
+"Hodder," said Phil, "is converting the heathen. You couldn't have kept
+George away. And it was George who made Sally stay!"
+
+Presently they found themselves established between a rawboned young
+workingman who smelled strongly of soap, whose hair was plastered
+tightly against his forehead, and a young woman who leaned against the
+wall. The black in which she was dressed enhanced the whiteness and
+weariness of her face, and she sat gazing ahead of her, apparently
+unconscious of those who surrounded her, her hands tightly folded in her
+lap. In their immediate vicinity, indeed, might have been found all the
+variety of type seen in the ordinary street car. And in truth there were
+some who seemed scarcely to realize they were not in a public vehicle.
+An elaborately dressed female in front of them, whose expansive hat
+brushed her neighbours, made audible comments to a stout man with a red
+neck which was set in a crease above his low collar.
+
+"They tell me Eldon Parr's pew has a gold plate on it. I wish I knew
+which it was. It ain't this one, anyway, I'll bet."
+
+"Say, they march in in this kind of a church, don't they?" some one said
+behind them.
+
+Eleanor, with her lips tightly pressed, opened her prayer book. Alison's
+lips were slightly parted as she gazed about her, across the aisle. Her
+experience of the Sunday before, deep and tense as it had been, seemed
+as nothing compared to this; the presence of all these people stimulated
+her inexpressibly, fired her; and she felt the blood pulsing through
+her body as she contrasted this gathering with the dignified, scattered
+congregation she had known. She scarcely recognized the church itself
+... She speculated on the homes from which these had come, and the
+motives which had brought them.
+
+For a second the perfume of the woman in front, mingling with other less
+definable odours, almost sickened her, evoking suggestions of tawdry,
+trivial, vulgar lives, fed on sensation and excitement; but the feeling
+was almost immediately swept away by a renewed sense of the bigness of
+the thing which she beheld,--of which, indeed, she was a part. And her
+thoughts turned more definitely to the man who had brought it all about.
+Could he control it, subdue it? Here was Opportunity suddenly upon him,
+like a huge, curving, ponderous wave. Could he ride it? or would it
+crush him remorselessly?
+
+Sensitive, alert, quickened as she was, she began to be aware of other
+values: of the intense spiritual hunger in the eyes of the woman in
+black, the yearning of barren, hopeless existences. And here and there
+Alison's look fell upon more prosperous individuals whose expressions
+proclaimed incredulity, a certain cynical amusement at the spectacle:
+others seemed uneasy, as having got more than they had bargained for,
+deliberating whether to flee... and then, just as her suspense was
+becoming almost unbearable, the service began....
+
+How it had been accomplished, the thing she later felt, was beyond the
+range of intellectual analysis. Nor could she have told how much later,
+since the passage of time had gone unnoticed. Curiosities, doubts,
+passions, longings, antagonisms--all these seemed--as the most natural
+thing in the world--to have been fused into one common but ineffable
+emotion. Such, at least, was the impression to which Alison startlingly
+awoke. All the while she had been conscious of Hodder, from the moment
+she had heard his voice in the chancel; but somehow this consciousness
+of him had melted, imperceptibly, into that of the great congregation,
+once divided against itself, which had now achieved unity of soul.
+
+The mystery as to how this had been effected was the more elusive when
+she considered the absence of all methods which might have been deemed
+revivalistic. Few of those around her evinced a familiarity with
+the historic service. And then occurred to her his explanation of
+personality as the medium by which all truth is revealed, by which the
+current of religion, the motive power in all history, is transmitted.
+Surely this was the explanation, if it might be called one! That
+tingling sense of a pervading spirit which was his,--and yet not his. He
+was the incandescent medium, and yet, paradoxically, gained in identity
+and individuality and was inseparable from the thing itself.
+
+She could not see him. A pillar hid the chancel from her view.
+
+The service, to which she had objected as archaic, became subordinate,
+spiritualized, dominated by the personality. Hodder had departed from
+the usual custom by giving out the page of the psalter: and the verses,
+the throbbing responses which arose from every corner of the church,
+assumed a new significance, the vision of the ancient seer revived. One
+verse he read resounded with prophecy.
+
+"Thou shalt deliver me from the strivings of the people: and thou shalt
+make me the head of the heathen."
+
+And the reply:
+
+"A people whom I have not known shall serve me."
+
+The working-man next to Alison had no prayer-book. She thrust her own
+into his hand, and they read from it together....
+
+When they came to the second hymn the woman in front of her had
+wonderfully shed her vulgarity. Her voice--a really good one--poured
+itself out:
+
+       "See a long race thy spacious courts adorn,
+        See future sons, and daughters yet unborn,
+        In crowding ranks on every side arise,
+        Demanding life, impatient for the skies."
+
+Once Alison would have been critical of the words She was beyond that,
+now. What did it matter, if the essential Thing were present?
+
+The sermon was a surprise. And those who had come for excitement, for
+the sensation of hearing a denunciation of a class they envied and
+therefore hated, and nevertheless strove to imitate, were themselves
+rebuked. Were not their standards the same? And if the standard were
+false, it followed inevitably that the life was false also.
+
+Hodder fairly startled these out of their preconceived notions of
+Christianity. Let them shake out of their minds everything they
+had thought it to mean, churchgoing, acceptance of creed and dogma,
+contributive charity, withdrawal from the world, rites and ceremonies:
+it was none of these.
+
+The motive in the world to-day was the acquisition of property; the
+motive of Christianity was absolutely and uncompromisingly opposed
+to this. Shock their practical sense as it might, Christianity looked
+forward with steadfast faith to a time when the incentive to amass
+property would be done away with, since it was a source of evil and a
+curse to mankind. If they would be Christians, let them face that. Let
+them enter into life, into the struggles going on around them to-day
+against greed, corruption, slavery, poverty, vice and crime. Let them
+protest, let them fight, even as Jesus Christ had fought and protested.
+For as sure as they sat there the day would come when they would be
+called to account, would be asked the question--what had they done to
+make the United States of America a better place to live in?
+
+There were in the Apostolic writings and tradition misinterpretations
+of life which had done much harm. Early Christianity had kept its eyes
+fixed on another world, and had ignored this: had overlooked the fact
+that every man and woman was put here to do a particular work. In the
+first epistle of Peter the advice was given, "submit yourselves to
+every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake." But Christ had preached
+democracy, responsibility, had foreseen a millennium, the fulfilment of
+his Kingdom, when all men, inspired by the Spirit, would make and keep
+in spirit the ordinances of God.
+
+Before they could do God's work and man's work they must first be
+awakened, filled with desire. Desire was power. And he prayed that
+some of them, on this day, would receive that desire, that power which
+nothing could resist. The desire which would lead each and every one
+to the gates of the Inner World which was limitless and eternal, filled
+with dazzling light....
+
+Let them have faith then. Not credulity in a vague God they could not
+imagine, but faith in the Spirit of the Universe, humanity, in Jesus
+Christ who had been the complete human revelation of that Spirit, who
+had suffered and died that man might not live in ignorance of it. To
+doubt humanity,--such was the Great Refusal, the sin against the Holy
+Ghost, the repudiation of the only true God!
+
+After a pause, he spoke simply of his hope for St. John's. If he
+remained here his ambition was that it would be the free temple of
+humanity, of Jesus Christ, supported not by a few, but by all,--each in
+accordance with his means. Of those who could afford nothing, nothing
+would be required. Perhaps this did not sound practical, nor would it be
+so if the transforming inspiration failed. He could only trust and
+try, hold up to them the vision of the Church as a community of willing
+workers for the Kingdom...
+
+
+
+III
+
+After the service was over the people lingered in the church, standing
+in the pews and aisles, as though loath to leave. The woman with the
+perfume and the elaborate hat was heard to utter a succinct remark.
+
+"Say, Charlie, I guess he's all right. I never had it put like that."
+
+The thick-necked man's reply was inaudible.
+
+Eleanor Goodrich was silent and a little pale as she pressed close to
+Alison. Her imagination had been stretched, as it were, and she was
+still held in awe by the vastness of what she had heard and seen. Vaster
+even than ever,--so it appeared now,--demanding greater sacrifices than
+she had dreamed of. She looked back upon the old as at receding shores.
+
+Alison, with absorbed fascination, watched the people; encountered, here
+and there, recognitions from men and women with whom she had once danced
+and dined in what now seemed a previous existence. Why had they come?
+and how had they received the message? She ran into a little man, a
+dealer in artists' supplies who once had sold her paints and brushes,
+who stared and bowed uncertainly. She surprised him by taking his hand.
+
+"Did you like it?" she asked, impulsively.
+
+"It's what I've been thinking for years, Miss Parr," he responded,
+"thinking and feeling. But I never knew it was Christianity. And I never
+thought--" he stopped and looked at her, alarmed.
+
+"Oh," she said, "I believe in it, too--or try to."
+
+She left him, mentally gasping.... Without, on the sidewalk, Eleanor
+Goodrich was engaged in conversation with a stockily built man, inclined
+to stoutness; he had a brown face and a clipped, bristly mustache.
+Alison paused involuntarily, and saw him start and hesitate as his
+clear, direct gaze met her own.
+
+Bedloe Hubbell was one of those who had once sought to marry her. She
+recalled him as an amiable and aimless boy; and after she had gone East
+she had received with incredulity and then with amusement the news of
+his venture into altruistic politics. It was his efficiency she had
+doubted, not his sincerity. Later tidings, contemptuous and eventually
+irritable utterances of her own father, together with accounts in the
+New York newspapers of his campaign, had convinced her in spite of
+herself that Bedloe Hubbell had actually shaken the seats of power. And
+somehow, as she now took him in, he looked it.
+
+His transformation was one of the signs, one of the mysteries of the
+times. The ridicule and abuse of the press, the opposition and enmity
+of his childhood friends, had developed the man of force she now beheld,
+and who came forward to greet her.
+
+"Alison!" he exclaimed. He had changed in one sense, and not in another.
+Her colour deepened as the sound of his voice brought back the lapsed
+memories of the old intimacy. For she had been kind to him, kinder than
+to any other; and the news of his marriage--to a woman from the Pacific
+coast--had actually induced in her certain longings and regrets. When
+the cards had reached her, New York and the excitement of the life into
+which she had been weakly, if somewhat unwittingly, drawn had already
+begun to pall.
+
+"I'm so glad to see you," she told him. "I've heard--so many things. And
+I'm very much in sympathy with what you're doing."
+
+They crossed the street, and walked away from the church together. She
+had surprised him, and made him uncomfortable.
+
+"You've been away so long," he managed to say, "perhaps you do not
+realize--"
+
+"Oh, yes, I do," she interrupted. "I am on the other side, on your side.
+I thought of writing you, when you nearly won last autumn."
+
+"You see it, too?" he exclaimed.
+
+"Yes, I've changed, too. Not so much as you," she added, shyly. "I
+always had a certain sympathy, you know, with the Robin Hoods."
+
+He laughed at her designation, both pleased and taken aback by her
+praise... But he wondered if she knew the extent of his criticism of her
+father.
+
+"That rector is a wonderful man," he broke out, irrelevantly. "I can't
+get over' him--I can't quite grasp the fact that he exists, that he has
+dared to do what he has done."
+
+This brought her colour back, but she faced him bravely. "You think he is
+wonderful, then?"
+
+"Don't you?" he demanded.
+
+She assented. "But I am curious to know why you do. Somehow, I never
+thought of--you--"
+
+"As religious," he supplied. "And you? If I remember rightly--"
+
+"Yes," she interrupted, "I revolted, too. But Mr. Hodder puts it so--it
+makes one wonder."
+
+"He has not only made me wonder," declared Bedloe Hubbell, emphatically,
+"I never knew what religion was until I heard this man last Sunday."
+
+"Last Sunday!"
+
+"Until then, I hadn't been inside of a church for fifteen years,--except
+to get married. My wife takes the children, occasionally, to a
+Presbyterian church near us."
+
+"And why, did you go then?" she asked.
+
+"I am a little ashamed of my motive," he confessed. "There were
+rumours--I don't pretend to know how they got about--" he hesitated,
+once more aware of delicate ground. "Wallis Plimpton said something to
+a man who told me. I believe I went out of sheer curiosity to hear
+what Hodder would have to say. And then, I had been reading, wondering
+whether there were anything in Christianity, after all."
+
+"Yes?" she said, careless now as to what cause he might attribute her
+eagerness. "And he gave you something?"
+
+It was then she grasped the truth that this sudden renewed intimacy was
+the result of the impression Hodder had left upon the minds of both.
+
+"He gave me everything," Bedloe Hubbell replied. "I am willing to
+acknowledge it freely. In his explanation of the parable of the Prodigal
+Son, he gave me the clew to our modern times. What was for me an
+inextricable puzzle has become clear as day. He has made me understand,
+at last, the force which stirred me, which goaded me until I was fairly
+compelled to embark in the movement which the majority of our citizens
+still continue to regard as quixotic. I did not identify that force with
+religion, then, and when I looked back on the first crazy campaign we
+embarked upon, with the whole city laughing at me and at the obscure
+and impractical personnel we had, there were moments when it seemed
+incomprehensible folly. I had nothing to gain, and everything to lose
+by such a venture. I was lazy and easy-going, as you know. I belonged
+to the privileged class, I had sufficient money to live in comparative
+luxury all my days, I had no grudge against these men whom I had known
+all my life."
+
+"But it must have had some beginning," said Alison.
+
+"I was urged to run for the city council, by these very men." Bedloe
+Hubbell smiled at the recollection. "They accuse me now of having
+indulged once in the same practice, for which I am condemning them.
+Our company did accept rebates, and we sought favours from the city
+government. I have confessed it freely on the platform. Even during my
+first few months in the council what may be called the old political
+practices seemed natural to me. But gradually the iniquity of it all
+began to dawn on me, and then I couldn't rest until I had done something
+towards stopping it.
+
+"At length I began to see," he continued, "that education of the masses
+was to be our only preserver, that we should have to sink or swim by
+that. I began to see, dimly, that this was true for other movements
+going on to-day. Now comes Hodder with what I sincerely believe is the
+key. He compels men like me to recognize that our movements are not
+merely moral, but religious. Religion, as yet unidentified, is the force
+behind these portentous stirrings of politics in our country, from sea
+to sea. He aims, not to bring the Church into politics, but to make her
+the feeder of these movements. Men join them to-day from all motives,
+but the religious is the only one to which they may safely be trusted.
+He has rescued the jewel from the dust-heap of tradition, and holds it
+up, shining, before our eyes."
+
+Alison looked at her companion.
+
+"That," she said, "is a very beautiful phrase."
+
+Bedloe Hubbell smiled queerly.
+
+"I don't know why I'm telling you all this. I can't usually talk about
+it. But the sight of that congregation this morning, mixed as it was,
+and the way he managed to weld it together."
+
+"Ah, you noticed that!" she exclaimed sharply.
+
+"Noticed it!"
+
+"I know. It was a question of feeling it."
+
+There was a silence.
+
+"Will he succeed?" she asked presently.
+
+"Ah," said Bedloe Hubbell, "how is it possible to predict it? The forces
+against him are tremendous, and it is usually the pioneer who suffers.
+I agree absolutely with his definition of faith, I have it. And the work
+he has done already can never be undone. The time is ripe, and it is
+something that he has men like Phil Goodrich behind him, and Mr. Waring.
+I'm going to enlist, and from now on I intend to get every man and woman
+upon whom I have any influence whatever to go to that church...." A
+little later Alison, marvelling, left him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI. THE CURRENT OF LIFE
+
+
+I
+
+The year when Hodder had gone east--to Bremerton and Bar Harbor, he
+had read in the train a magazine article which had set fire to his
+imagination. It had to do with the lives of the men, the engineers who
+dared to deal with the wild and terrible power of the western hills, who
+harnessed and conquered roaring rivers, and sent the power hundreds
+of miles over the wilderness, by flimsy wires, to turn the wheels of
+industry and light the dark places of the cities. And, like all men who
+came into touch with elemental mysteries, they had their moments of pure
+ecstasy, gaining a tingling, intenser life from the contact with dynamic
+things; and other moments when, in their struggle for mastery, they were
+buffeted about, scorched, and almost overwhelmed.
+
+In these days the remembrance of that article came back to Hodder. It
+was as though he, too, were seeking to deflect and guide a force--the
+Force of forces. He, too, was buffeted, scorched, and bruised, at
+periods scarce given time to recover himself in the onward rush he
+himself had started, and which he sought to control. Problems arose
+which demanded the quick thinking of emergency. He, too, had his moments
+of reward, the reward of the man who is in touch with reality.
+
+He lived, from day to day, in a bewildering succession of encouragements
+and trials, all unprecedented. If he remained at St. John's, an entire
+new organization would be necessary.... He did not as yet see it
+clearly; and in the meantime, with his vestry alienated, awaiting the
+bishop's decision, he could make no definite plans, even if he had
+had the leisure. Wholesale desertions had occurred in the guilds and
+societies, the activities of which had almost ceased. Little Tomkinson,
+the second assistant, had resigned; and McCrae, who worked harder
+than ever before, was already marked, Hodder knew, for dismissal if he
+himself were defeated.
+
+And then there was the ever present question of money. It remained to
+be seen whether a system of voluntary offerings were practicable. For
+Hodder had made some inquiries into the so-called "free churches," only
+to discover that there were benefactors behind them, benefactors the
+Christianity of whose lives was often doubtful.
+
+One morning he received in the mail the long-expected note from the
+bishop, making an appointment for the next day. Hodder, as he read it
+over again, smiled to himself... He could gather nothing of the mind of
+the writer from the contents.
+
+The piece of news which came to him on the same morning swept completely
+the contemplations of the approaching interview from his mind. Sally
+Grover stopped in at the parish house on her way to business.
+
+"Kate Marcy's gone," she announced, in her abrupt fashion.
+
+"Gone!" he exclaimed, and stared at her in dismay. "Gone where?"
+
+"That's just it," said Miss Grover. "I wish I knew. I reckon we'd got
+into the habit of trusting her too much, but it seemed the only way. She
+wasn't in her room last night, but Ella Finley didn't find it out until
+this morning, and she ran over scared to death, to tell us about it."
+
+Involuntarily the rector reached for his hat.
+
+"I've sent out word among our friends in Dalton Street," Sally
+continued. An earthquake could not have disturbed her outer,
+matter-of-fact calmness. But Hodder was not deceived: he knew that she
+was as profoundly grieved and discouraged as himself. "And I've got old
+Gratz, the cabinet-maker, on the job. If she's in Dalton Street, he'll
+find her."
+
+"But what--?" Hodder began.
+
+Sally threw up her hands.
+
+"You never can tell, with that kind. But it sticks in my mind she's done
+something foolish."
+
+"Foolish?"
+
+Sally twitched, nervously.
+
+"Somehow I don't think it's a spree--but as I say, you can't tell. She's
+full of impulses. You remember how she frightened us once before, when
+she went off and stayed all night with the woman she used to know in the
+flat house, when she heard she was sick?"
+
+Hodder nodded.
+
+"You've inquired there?"
+
+"That woman went to the hospital, you know. She may be with another one.
+If she is, Gratz ought to find her... You know there was a time, Mr.
+Hodder, when I didn't have much hope that we'd pull her through. But
+we got hold of her through her feelings. She'd do anything for Mr.
+Bentley--she'd do anything for you, and the way she stuck to that
+embroidery was fine. I don't say she was cured, but whenever she'd feel
+one of those fits coming on she'd let us know about it, and we'd watch
+her. And I never saw one of that kind change so. Why, she must be almost
+as good looking now as she ever was."
+
+"You don't think she has done anything--desperate?" asked Hodder,
+slowly.
+
+Sally comprehended.
+
+"Well--somehow I don't. She used to say if she ever got drunk again
+she'd never come back. But she didn't have any money--she's given Mr.
+Bentley every cent of it. And we didn't have any warning. She was as
+cheerful as could be yesterday morning, Mrs. McQuillen says."
+
+"It might not do any harm to notify the police," replied Hodder, rising.
+"I'll go around to headquarters now."
+
+He was glad of the excuse for action. He could not have sat still. And
+as he walked rapidly across Burton Street he realized with a pang how
+much his heart had been set on Kate Marcy's redemption. In spite of the
+fact that every moment of his time during the past fortnight had been
+absorbed by the cares, responsibilities, and trials thrust upon him,
+he reproached himself for not having gone oftener to Dalton Street.
+And yet, if Mr. Bentley and Sally Grower had been unable to foresee and
+prevent this, what could he have done?
+
+At police headquarters he got no news. The chief received him
+deferentially, sympathetically, took down Kate Marcy's description, went
+so far as to remark, sagely, that too much mustn't be expected of these
+women, and said he would notify the rector if she were found. The chief
+knew and admired Mr. Bentley, and declared he was glad to meet Mr.
+Hodder... Hodder left, too preoccupied to draw any significance from the
+nature of his welcome. He went at once to Mr. Bentley's.
+
+The old gentleman was inclined to be hopeful, to take Sally Grower's
+view of the matter.. He trusted, he said, Sally's instinct. And Hodder
+came away less uneasy, not a little comforted by a communion which never
+failed to fortify him, to make him marvel at the calmness of that world
+in which his friend lived, a calmness from which no vicarious sorrow was
+excluded. And before Hodder left, Mr. Bentley had drawn from him some
+account of the more recent complexities at the church. The very pressure
+of his hand seemed to impart courage.
+
+"You won't stay and have dinner with me?"
+
+The rector regretfully declined.
+
+"I hear the bishop has returned," said Mr. Bentley, smiling.
+
+Hodder was surprised. He had never heard Mr. Bentley speak of the
+bishop. Of course he must know him.
+
+"I have my talk with him to-morrow."
+
+Mr. Bentley said nothing, but pressed his hand again....
+
+On Tower Street, from the direction of the church, he beheld a young man
+and a young woman approaching him absorbed in conversation. Even at a
+distance both seemed familiar, and presently he identified the lithe
+and dainty figure in the blue dress as that of the daughter of his
+vestryman, Francis Ferguson. Presently she turned her face, alight with
+animation, from her companion, and recognized him.
+
+"It's Mr. Hodder!" she exclaimed, and was suddenly overtaken with a
+crimson shyness. The young man seemed equally embarrassed as they stood
+facing the rector.
+
+"I'm afraid you don't remember me, Mr. Hodder," he said. "I met you at
+Mr. Ferguson's last spring."
+
+Then it came to him. This was the young man who had made the faux pas
+which had caused Mrs. Ferguson so much consternation, and who had so
+manfully apologized afterwards. His puzzled expression relaxed into a
+smile, and he took the young man's hand.
+
+"I was going to write to you," said Nan, as she looked up at the rector
+from under the wide brim of her hat. "Our engagement is to be announced
+Wednesday."
+
+Hodder congratulated them. There was a brief silence, when Nan said
+tremulously:
+
+"We're coming to St. John's!"
+
+"I'm very glad," Hodder replied, gravely. It was one of those
+compensating moments, for him, when his tribulations vanished; and the
+tributes of the younger generation were those to which his heart most
+freely responded. But the situation, in view of the attitude of Francis
+Ferguson, was too delicate to be dwelt upon.
+
+"I came to hear you last Sunday, Mr. Hodder," the young man volunteered,
+with that mixture of awkwardness and straightforwardness which often
+characterize his sex and age in referring to such matters. "And I had
+an idea of writing you, too, to tell you how much I liked what you said.
+But I know you must have had many letters. You've made me think."
+
+He flushed, but met the rector's eye. Nan stood regarding him with
+pride.
+
+"You've made me think, too," she added. "And we intend to pitch in and
+help you, if we can be of any use."
+
+He parted from them, wondering. And it was not until he had reached the
+parish house that it occurred to him that he was as yet unenlightened as
+to the young man's name....
+
+His second reflection brought back to his mind Kate Mercy, for it was
+with a portion of Nan Ferguson's generous check that her board had been
+paid. And he recalled the girl's hope, as she had given it to him, that
+he would find some one in Dalton Street to help....
+
+
+
+II
+
+There might, to the mundane eye, have been an element of the ridiculous
+in the spectacle of the rector of St. John's counting his gains, since
+he had chosen--with every indication of insanity--to bring the pillars
+of his career crashing down on his own head. By no means the least,
+however, of the treasures flung into his lap was the tie which now bound
+him to the Philip Goodriches, which otherwise would never have been
+possible. And as he made his way thither on this particular evening, a
+renewed sense came upon him of his emancipation from the dreary, useless
+hours he had been wont to spend at other dinner tables. That existence
+appeared to him now as the glittering, feverish unreality of a nightmare
+filled with restless women and tired men who drank champagne, thus
+gradually achieving--by the time cigars were reached--an artificial
+vivacity. The caprice and superficiality of the one sex, the inability
+to dwell upon or even penetrate a serious subject, the blindness to what
+was going on around them; the materialism, the money standard of both,
+were nauseating in the retrospect.
+
+How, indeed, had life once appeared so distorted to him, a professed
+servant of humanity, as to lead him in the name of duty into that
+galley?
+
+Such was the burden of his thought when the homelike front of the
+Goodrich house greeted him in the darkness, its enshrouded windows
+gleaming with friendly light. As the door opened, the merry sound of
+children's laughter floated down the stairs, and it seemed to Hodder
+as though a curse had been lifted.... The lintel of this house had
+been marked for salvation, the scourge had passed it by: the scourge of
+social striving which lay like a blight on a free people.
+
+Within, the note of gentility, of that instinctive good taste to which
+many greater mansions aspired in vain, was sustained. The furniture,
+the pictures, the walls and carpets were true expressions of the
+individuality of master and mistress, of the unity of the life lived
+together; and the rector smiled as he detected, in a corner of the hall,
+a sturdy but diminutive hobby-horse--here the final, harmonious touch.
+There was the sound of a scuffle, treble shrieks of ecstasy from above,
+and Eleanor Goodrich came out to welcome him.
+
+"Its Phil," she told him in laughing despair, "he upsets all my
+discipline, and gets them so excited they don't go to sleep for
+hours..."
+
+Seated in front of the fire in the drawing-room, he found Alison Parr.
+Her coolness, her radiancy, her complete acceptance of the situation,
+all this and more he felt from the moment he touched her hand and looked
+into her face. And never had she so distinctly represented to him the
+mysterious essence of fate. Why she should have made the fourth at this
+intimate gathering, and whether or not she was or had been an especial
+friend of Eleanor Goodrich he did not know. There was no explanation....
+
+A bowl of superb chrysanthemums occupied the centre of the table.
+Eleanor lifted them off and placed them on the sideboard.
+
+"I've got used to looking at Phil," she explained, "and craning is so
+painful."
+
+The effect at first was to increase the intensity of the intimacy. There
+was no reason--he told himself--why Alison's self-possession should have
+been disturbed; and as he glanced at her from time to time he perceived
+that it was not. So completely was she mistress of herself that
+presently he felt a certain faint resentment rising within him,--yet
+he asked himself why she should not have been. It was curious that his
+imagination would not rise, now, to a realization of that intercourse
+on which, at times, his fancy had dwelt with such vividness. The very
+interest, the eagerness with which she took part in their discussions
+seemed to him in the nature of an emphatic repudiation of any ties to
+him which might have been binding.
+
+All this was only, on Hodder's part, to be aware of the startling
+discovery as to how strong his sense of possession had been, and how
+irrational, how unwarranted.
+
+For he had believed himself, as regarding her, to have made the supreme
+renunciation of his life. And the very fact that he had not consulted,
+could not consult her feelings and her attitude made that renunciation
+no less difficult. All effort, all attempt at achievement of the only
+woman for whom he had ever felt the sublime harmony of desire--the
+harmony of the mind and the flesh--was cut off.
+
+To be here, facing her again in such close proximity, was at once a
+pleasure and a torture. And gradually he found himself yielding to the
+pleasure, to the illusion of permanency created by her presence.
+And, when all was said, he had as much to be grateful for as he could
+reasonably have wished; yes, and more. The bond (there was a bond, after
+all!) which united them was unbreakable. They had forged it together.
+The future would take care of itself.
+
+The range of the conversation upon which they at length embarked was
+a tacit acknowledgment of a relationship which now united four persons
+who, six months before, would have believed themselves to have had
+nothing in common. And it was characteristic of the new interest that
+it transcended the limits of the parish of St. John's, touched upon the
+greater affairs to which that parish--if their protest prevailed--would
+now be dedicated. Not that the church was at once mentioned, but
+subtly implied as now enlisted,--and emancipated henceforth from all
+ecclesiastical narrowness.... The amazing thing by which Hodder was
+suddenly struck was the naturalness with which Alison seemed to fit into
+the new scheme. It was as though she intended to remain there, and had
+abandoned all intention of returning to the life which apparently she
+had once permanently and definitely chosen....
+
+Bedloe Hubbell's campaign was another topic. And Phil had observed,
+with the earnestness which marked his more serious statements, that it
+wouldn't surprise him if young Carter, Hubbell's candidate for mayor,
+overturned that autumn the Beatty machine.
+
+"Oh, do you think so!" Alison exclaimed with exhilaration.
+
+"They're frightened and out of breath," said Phil, "they had no idea
+that Bedloe would stick after they had licked him in three campaigns.
+Two years ago they tried to buy him off by offering to send him to the
+Senate, and Wallis Plimpton has never got through his head to this why
+he refused."
+
+Plimpton's head, Eleanor declared dryly, was impervious to a certain
+kind of idea.
+
+"I wonder if you know, Mr. Hodder, what an admirer Mr. Hubbell is of
+yours?" Alison asked. "He is most anxious to have a talk with you."
+
+Hodder did not know.
+
+"Well," said Phil, enthusiastically, to the rector, "that's the best
+tribute you've had yet. I can't say that Bedloe was a more unregenerate
+heathen than I was, but he was pretty bad."
+
+This led them, all save Hodder, into comments on the character of the
+congregation the Sunday before, in the midst of which the rector was
+called away to the telephone. Sally Grover had promised to let him know
+whether or not they had found Kate Marcy, and his face was grave when he
+returned.... He was still preoccupied, an hour later, when Alison arose
+to go.
+
+"But your carriage isn't here," said Phil, going to the window.
+
+"Oh, I preferred to, walk," she told him, "it isn't far."
+
+
+
+III
+
+A blood-red October moon shed the fulness of its light on the silent
+houses, and the trees, still clinging to leaf, cast black shadows across
+the lawns and deserted streets. The very echoes of their footsteps on
+the pavement seemed to enhance the unreality of their surroundings: Some
+of the residences were already closed for the night, although the hour
+was not late, and the glow behind the blinds of the others was nullified
+by the radiancy from above. To Hodder, the sense of their isolation had
+never been more complete.
+
+Alison, while repudiating the notion that an escort were needed in a
+neighbourhood of such propriety and peace, had not refused his offer
+to accompany her. And Hodder felt instinctively, as he took his place
+beside her, a sense of climax. This situation, like those of the past,
+was not of his own making. It was here; confronting him, and a certain
+inevitable intoxication at being once, more alone with her prevented
+him from forming any policy with which to deal with it. He might either
+trust himself, or else he might not. And as she said, the distance was
+not great. But he could not help wondering, during those first moments
+of silence, whether she comprehended the strength of the temptation to
+which she subjected him....
+
+The night was warm. She wore a coat, which was open, and from time to
+time he caught the gleam of the moonlight on the knotted pearls at her
+throat. Over her head she had flung, mantilla-like, a black lace scarf,
+the effect of which was, in the soft luminosity encircling her, to add
+to the quality of mystery never exhausted. If by acquiescing in his
+company she had owned to a tie between them, the lace shawl falling
+over the tails of her dark hair and framing in its folds her face, had
+somehow made her once more a stranger. Nor was it until she presently
+looked up into his face with a smile that this impression was, if not at
+once wholly dissipated, at least contradicted.
+
+Her question, indeed, was intimate.
+
+"Why did you come with me?"
+
+"Why?" he repeated, taken aback.
+
+"Yes. I'm sure you have something you wish to do, something which
+particularly worries you."
+
+"No," he answered, appraising her intuition of him, "there is nothing
+I can do, to-night. A young woman in whom Mr. Bentley is interested, in
+whom I am interested, has disappeared. But we have taken all the steps
+possible towards finding her."
+
+"It was nothing--more serious, then? That, of course, is serious enough.
+Nothing, I mean, directly affecting your prospects of remaining--where
+you are?"
+
+"No," he answered. He rejoiced fiercely that she should have asked him.
+The question was not bold, but a natural resumption of the old footing
+"Not that I mean to imply," he added, returning her smile, "that those
+prospects' are in any way improved."
+
+"Are they any worse?" she said.
+
+"I see the bishop to-morrow. I have no idea what position he will
+take. But even if he should decide not to recommend me for trial many
+difficult problems still remain to be solved."
+
+"I know. It's fine," she continued, after a moment, "the way you are
+going ahead as if there were no question of your not remaining; and
+getting all those people into the church and influencing them as you did
+when they had come for all sorts of reasons. Do you remember, the first
+time I met you, I told you I could not think of you as a clergyman. I
+cannot now--less than ever."
+
+"What do you think of me as?" he asked.
+
+"I don't know," she considered. "You are unlike any person I have ever
+known. It is curious that I cannot now even think of St. John's as
+a church. You have transformed it into something that seems new. I'm
+afraid I can't describe what I mean, but you have opened it up, let in
+the fresh air, rid it of the musty and deadening atmosphere which I
+have always associated with churches. I wanted to see you, before I went
+away," she went on steadily, "and when Eleanor mentioned that you were
+coming to her house to-night, I asked her to invite me. Do you think me
+shameless?"
+
+The emphasis of his gesture was sufficient. He could not trust himself
+to speak.
+
+"Writing seemed so unsatisfactory, after what you had done for me, and I
+never can express myself in writing. I seem to congeal."
+
+"After what I have done for you!" he exclaimed: "What can I have done?"
+
+"You have done more than you know," she answered, in a low voice. "More,
+I think, than I know. How are such things to be measured, put into
+words? You have effected some change in me which defies analysis, a
+change of attitude,--to attempt to dogmatize it would ruin it. I prefer
+to leave it undefined--not even to call it an acquisition of faith. I
+have faith," she said, simply, "in what you have become, and which has
+made you dare, superbly, to cast everything away... It is that, more
+than anything you have said. What you are."
+
+For the instant he lost control of himself.
+
+"What you are," he replied. "Do you realize--can you ever realize what
+your faith in me has been to me?"
+
+She appeared to ignore this.
+
+"I did not mean to say that you have not made many things clear, which
+once were obscure, as I wrote you. You have convinced me that true
+belief, for instance, is the hardest thing in the world, the denial of
+practically all these people, who profess to believe, represent. The
+majority of them insist that humanity is not to be trusted..."
+
+They had reached, in an incredibly brief time, the corner of Park
+Street.
+
+"When are you leaving?" he asked, in a voice that sounded harsh in his
+own ears.
+
+"Come!" she said gently, "I'm not going in yet, for a while."
+
+The Park lay before them, an empty, garden filled with checquered
+light and shadows under the moon. He followed her across the gravel,
+glistening with dew, past the statue of the mute statesman with arm
+upraised, into pastoral stretches--a delectable country which was theirs
+alone. He did not take it in, save as one expression of the breathing
+woman at his side. He was but partly conscious of a direction he had not
+chosen. His blood throbbed violently, and a feeling of actual physical
+faintness was upon him. He was being led, helplessly, all volition gone,
+and the very idea of resistance became chimerical....
+
+There was a seat under a tree, beside a still lake burnished by the
+moon. It seemed as though he could not bear the current of her touch,
+and yet the thought of its removal were less bearable... For she had put
+her own hand out, not shyly, but with a movement so fraught with grace,
+so natural that it was but the crowning bestowal.
+
+"Alison!" he cried, "I can't ask it of you. I have no right--"
+
+"You're not asking it," she answered. "It is I who am asking it."
+
+"But I have no future--I may be an outcast to-morrow. I have nothing to
+offer you." He spoke more firmly now, more commandingly.
+
+"Don't you see, dear, that it is just because your future as obscure
+that I can do this? You never would have done it, I know,--and I
+couldn't face that. Don't you understand that I am demanding the great
+sacrifice?"
+
+"Sacrifice!" he repeated. His fingers turned, and closed convulsively on
+hers.
+
+"Yes, sacrifice," she said gently. "Isn't it the braver thing?"
+
+Still he failed to catch her meaning.
+
+"Braver," she explained, with her wonderful courage, "braver if I love
+you, if I need you, if I cannot do without you."
+
+He took her in his arms, crushing her to him in his strength, in one
+ineffable brief moment finding her lips, inhaling the faint perfume
+of her smooth akin. Her lithe figure lay passively against him, in
+marvellous, unbelievable surrender.
+
+"I see what you mean," he said, at length, "I should have been a coward.
+But I could not be sure that you loved me."
+
+So near was her face that he could detect, even under the obscurity of
+the branches, a smile.
+
+"And so I was reduced to this! I threw my pride to the winds," she
+whispered. "But I don't care. I was determined, selfishly, to take
+happiness."
+
+"And to give it," he added, bending down to her. The supreme quality of
+its essence was still to be doubted, a bright star-dust which dazzled
+him, to evaporate before his waking eyes. And, try as he would, he could
+not realize to the full depth the boy of contact with a being whom, by
+discipline, he had trained his mind to look upon as the unattainable.
+They had spoken of the future, yet in these moments any consideration of
+it was blotted out... It was only by degrees that he collected himself
+sufficiently to be able to return to it... Alison took up the thread.
+
+"Surely," she said, "sacrifice is useless unless it means something,
+unless it be a realization. It must be discriminating. And we should
+both of us have remained incomplete if we had not taken--this. You would
+always, I think, have been the one man for me,--but we should have lost
+touch." He felt her tremble. "And I needed you. I have needed you all
+my life--one in whom h might have absolute faith. That is my faith, of
+which I could not tell you awhile ago. Is it--sacrilegious?"
+
+She looked up at him. He shook his head, thinking of his own. It seemed
+the very distillation of the divine. "All my life," she went on, "I
+have been waiting for the one who would risk everything. Oh, if you had
+faltered the least little bit, I don't know what I should have done.
+That would have destroyed what was left of me, put out, I think, the
+flickering fire that remained, instead of fanning it into flame. You
+cannot know how I watched you, how I prayed! I think it was prayer--I am
+sure it was. And it was because you did not falter, because you risked
+all, that you gained me. You have gained only what you yourself made,
+more than I ever was, more than I ever expected to be."
+
+"Alison!" he remonstrated, "you mustn't say that."
+
+She straightened up and gazed at him, taking one of his hands in her
+lithe fingers.
+
+"Oh, but I must! It is the truth. I felt that you cared--women are surer
+in such matters than men. I must conceal nothing from you--nothing of my
+craftiness. Women are crafty, you know. And suppose you fail? Ah, I do
+not mean failure--you cannot fail, now. You have put yourself forever
+beyond failure. But what I mean is, suppose you were compelled to leave
+St. John's, and I came to you then as I have come now, and begged to
+take my place beside you? I was afraid to risk it. I was afraid you
+would not take me, even now, to-night. Do you realize how austere you
+are at times, how you have frightened me?"
+
+"That I should ever have done that!" he said.
+
+"When I looked at you in the pulpit you seemed so far from me, I could
+scarcely bear it. As if I had no share in you, as if you had already
+gone to a place beyond, where I could not go, where I never could. Oh,
+you will take me with you, now,--you won't leave me behind!"
+
+To this cry every fibre of his soul responded. He had thought himself,
+in these minutes, to have known all feelings, all thrills, but now, as
+he gathered her to him again, he was to know still another, the most
+exquisite of all. That it was conferred upon him to give this woman
+protection, to shield and lift her, inspire her as she inspired
+him--this consciousness was the most exquisite of all, transcending all
+conception of the love of woman. And the very fulness of her was beyond
+him. A lifetime were insufficient to exhaust her....
+
+"I wanted to come to you now, John. I want to share your failure, if it
+comes--all your failures. Because they will be victories--don't you see?
+I have never been able to achieve that kind of victory--real victory, by
+myself. I have always succumbed, taken the baser, the easier thing." Her
+cheek was wet. "I wasn't strong enough, by myself, and I never knew the
+stronger one....
+
+"See what my trust in you has been! I knew that you would not refuse me
+in spite of the fact that the world may misunderstand, may sneer at
+your taking me. I knew that you were big enough even for that, when you
+understood it, coming from me. I wanted to be with you, now, that we
+might fight it out together."
+
+"What have I done to deserve so priceless a thing?" he asked.
+
+She smiled at him again, her lip trembling.
+
+"Oh, I'm not priceless, I'm only real, I'm only human--human and tired.
+You are so strong, you can't know how tired. Have you any idea why I
+came out here, this summer? It was because I was desperate--because I
+had almost decided to marry some one else."
+
+She felt him start.
+
+"I was afraid of it;" he said.
+
+"Were you? Did you think, did you wonder a little about me?" There was
+a vibrant note of triumph to which he reacted. She drew away from him.
+a little. "Perhaps, when you know how sordid my life has been, you won't
+want me."
+
+"Is--Is that your faith, Alison?" he demanded. "God forbid! You have
+come to a man who also has confessions to make."
+
+"Oh, I am glad. I want to know all of you--all, do you understand? That
+will bring us even closer together. And it was one thing I felt about
+you in the beginning, that day in the garden, that you had had much to
+conquer--more than most men. It was a part of your force and of your
+knowledge of life. You were not a sexless ascetic who preached a mere
+neutral goodness. Does that shock you?"
+
+He smiled in turn.
+
+"I went away from here, as I once told you, full of a high resolution
+not to trail the honour of my art--if I achieved art--in the dust. But
+I have not only trailed my art--I trailed myself. In New York I became
+contaminated,--the poison of the place, of the people with whom I came
+in contact, got into my blood. Little by little I yielded--I wanted so
+to succeed, to be able to confound those who had doubted and ridiculed
+me! I wasn't content to wait to deny myself for the ideal. Success was
+in the air. That was the poison, and I only began to realize it after it
+was too late.
+
+"Please don't think I am asking pity--I feel that you must know. From
+the very first my success--which was really failure--began to come in
+the wrong way. As my father's daughter I could not be obscure. I was
+sought out, I was what was called picturesque, I suppose. The women
+petted me, although some of them hated me, and I had a fascination for
+a certain kind of men--the wrong kind. I began going to dinners, house
+parties, to recognize, that advantages came that way.... It seemed quite
+natural. It was what many others of my profession tried to do, and they
+envied me my opportunities.
+
+"I ought to say, in justice to myself, that I was not in the least
+cynical about it. I believed I was clinging to the ideal of art, and
+that all I wanted was a chance. And the people I went with had the same
+characteristics, only intensified, as those I had known here. Of course
+I was actually no better than the women who were striving frivolously
+to get away from themselves, and the men who were fighting to get money.
+Only I didn't know it.
+
+"Well, my chance came at last. I had done several little things, when an
+elderly man who is tremendously rich, whose name you would recognize if
+I mentioned it, gave me an order. For weeks, nearly every day, he
+came to my studio for tea, to talk over the plans. I was really
+unsophisticated then--but I can see now--well, that the garden was a
+secondary consideration.... And the fact that I did it for him gave me a
+standing I should not otherwise have had.... Oh, it is sickening to look
+back upon, to think what an idiot I was in how little I saw....
+
+"That garden launched me, and I began to have more work than I could do.
+I was conscientious about it tried--tried to make every garden better
+than the last. But I was a young woman, unconventionally living alone,
+and by degrees the handicap of my sex was brought home to me. I did not
+feel the pressure at first, and then--I am ashamed to say--it had in it
+an element of excitement, a sense of power. The poison was at work.
+I was amused. I thought I could carry it through, that the world had
+advanced sufficiently for a woman to do anything if she only had the
+courage. And I believed I possessed a true broadness of view, and could
+impress it, so far as I was concerned, on others....
+
+"As I look back upon it all, I believe my reputation for coldness saved
+me, yet it was that very reputation which increased the pressure, and
+sometimes I was fairly driven into a corner. It seemed to madden
+some men--and the disillusionments began to come. Of course it was
+my fault--I don't pretend to say it wasn't. There were many whom,
+instinctively, I was on my guard against, but some I thought really
+nice, whom I trusted, revealed a side I had not suspected. That was the
+terrible thing! And yet I held to my ideal, tattered as it was..."
+
+Alison was silent a moment, still clinging to his hand, and when she
+spoke again it was with a tremor of agitation.
+
+"It is hard, to tell you this, but I wish you to know. At last I met
+a man, comparatively young, who was making his own way in New York,
+achieving a reputation as a lawyer. Shall I tell you that I fell in love
+with him? He seemed to bring a new freshness into my life when I was
+beginning to feel the staleness of it. Not that I surrendered at once,
+but the reservations of which I was conscious at the first gradually
+disappeared--or rather I ignored them. He had charm, a magnificent
+self-confidence, but I think the liberality of the opinions he
+expressed, in regard to women, most appealed to me. I was weak on that
+side, and I have often wondered whether he knew it. I believed him
+incapable of a great refusal.
+
+"He agreed, if I consented to marry him, that I should have my
+freedom--freedom to live in my own life and to carry on my profession.
+Fortunately, the engagement was never announced, never even suspected.
+One day he hinted that I should return to my father for a month or two
+before the wedding.... The manner in which he said it suddenly turned me
+cold. Oh," Alison exclaimed, "I was quite willing to go back, to pay
+my father a visit, as I had done nearly every year, but--how can I tell
+you?--he could not believe that I had definitely given up-my father's
+money....
+
+"I sat still and looked at him, I felt as if I were frozen, turned to
+stone. And after a long while, since I would not speak to him, he went
+out... Three months later he came back and said that I had misunderstood
+him, that he couldn't live without me. I sent him away.... Only the
+other day he married Amy Grant, one of my friends....
+
+"Well, after that, I was tired--so tired! Everything seemed to go out of
+life. It wasn't that I loved him any longer,--all had been crushed. But
+the illusion was gone, and I saw myself as I was. And for the first time
+in my life I felt defenceless, helpless. I wanted refuge. Did you ever
+hear of Jennings Howe?"
+
+"The architect?"
+
+Alison nodded. "Of course you must have--he is so well known. He has
+been a widower for several years. He liked my work, saw its defects,
+and was always frank about them, and I designed a good many gardens in
+connection with his houses. He himself is above all things an artist,
+and he fell into the habit of coming to my studio and giving me friendly
+advice, in the nicest way. He seemed to understand that I was going
+through some sort of a crisis. He called it 'too much society.' And
+then, without any warning, he asked me to marry him.
+
+"That is why I came out here--to think it over. I didn't love him, and I
+told him so, but I respected him.
+
+"He never compromised in his art, and I have known him over and over to
+refuse houses because certain conditions were stipulated. To marry him
+was an acknowledgment of defeat. I realized that. But I had come to the
+extremity where I wanted peace--peace and protection. I wanted to put
+myself irrevocably beyond the old life, which simply could not have gone
+on, and I saw myself in the advancing years becoming tawdry and worn,
+losing little by little what I had gained at a price.
+
+"So I came here--to reflect, to see, as it were, if I could find
+something left in me to take hold of, to build upon, to begin over
+again, perhaps, by going back to the old associations. I could think of
+no better place, and I knew that my father would, be going away after
+a few weeks, and that I should be lone, yet with an atmosphere back of
+me,--my old atmosphere. That was why I went to church the first Sunday,
+in order to feel more definitely that atmosphere, to summon up more
+completely the image of my mother. More and more, as the years have
+passed, I have thought of her in moments of trouble. I have recovered
+her as I never had hoped to do in Mr. Bentley. Isn't it strange," she
+exclaimed wonderingly, "that he should have come into both our lives,
+with such an influence, at this time?"
+
+"And then I met you, talked to you that afternoon in the garden. Shall I
+make a complete confession? I wrote to Jennings Howe that very week that
+I could not marry him."
+
+"You knew!" Hodder exclaimed: "You knew then?"
+
+"Ah, I can't tell what I knew--or when. I knew, after I had seen you,
+that I couldn't marry him! Isn't that enough?"
+
+He drew in his breath deeply.
+
+"I should be less than a man if I refused to take you, Alison. And--no
+matter what happens, I can and will find some honest work to support
+you. But oh, my dear, when I think of it, the nobility and generosity of
+what you have done appalls me."
+
+"No, no!" she protested, "you mustn't say that! I needed you more than
+you need me. And haven't we both discovered the world, and renounced it?
+I can at least go so far as to say that, with all my heart. And isn't
+marriage truer and higher when man and wife start with difficulties
+and problems to solve together? It is that thought that brings me the
+greatest joy, that I may be able to help you.... Didn't you need me,
+just a little?"
+
+"Now that I have you, I am unable to think of the emptiness which might
+have been. You came to me, like Beatrice, when I had lost my way in the
+darkness of the wood. And like Beatrice, you showed me the path, and
+hell and heaven."
+
+"Oh, you would have found the path without me. I cannot claim that.
+I saw from the first that you were destined to find it. And, unlike
+Beatrice, I too was lost, and it was you who lifted me up. You mustn't
+idealize me."... She stood up. "Come!" she said. He too stood, gazing at
+her, and she lifted her hands to his shoulders.... They moved out from
+under the tree and walked for a while in silence across the dew-drenched
+grass, towards Park Street. The moon, which had ridden over a great
+space in the sky, hung red above the blackness of the forest to the
+west.
+
+"Do you remember when we were here together, the day I met Mr. Bentley?
+And you never would have spoken!"
+
+"How could I, Alison?" he asked.
+
+"No, you couldn't. And yet--you would have let me go!"
+
+He put his arm in hers, and drew her towards him.
+
+"I must talk to your father," he said, "some day--soon. I ought to tell
+him--of our intentions. We cannot go on like this."
+
+"No," she agreed, "I realize it. And I cannot stay, much longer, in Park
+Street. I must go back to New York, until you send for me, dear. And
+there are things I must do. Do you know, even though I antagonize him
+so--my father, I mean--even though he suspects and bitterly resents any
+interest in you, my affection for you, and that I have lingered because
+of you, I believe, in his way, he has liked to have me here."
+
+"I can understand it," Hodder said.
+
+"It's because you are bigger than I, although he has quarrelled with
+you so bitterly. I don't know what definite wrongs he has done to other
+persons. I don't wish to know. I don't ask you to tell me what passed
+between you that night. Once you said that you had an affection for
+him--that he was lonely. He is lonely. In these last weeks, in spite of
+his anger, I can see that he suffers terribly. It is a tragedy, because
+he will never give in."
+
+"It is a tragedy." Hodder's tone was agitated.
+
+"I wonder if he realizes a little" she began, and paused. "Now that
+Preston has come home--"
+
+"Your brother?" Hodder exclaimed.
+
+"Yes. I forgot to tell you. I don't know why he came," she faltered.
+"I suppose he has got into some new trouble. He seems changed. I can't
+describe it now, but I will tell you about it.... It's the first time
+we've all three been together since my mother died, for Preston wasn't
+back from college when I went to Paris to study...."
+
+They stood together on the pavement before the massive house, fraught
+with so many and varied associations for Hodder. And as he looked up
+at it, his eye involuntarily rested upon the windows of the boy's
+room where Eldon Parr had made his confession. Alison startled him by
+pronouncing his name, which came with such unaccustomed sweetness from
+her lips. "You will write me to-morrow," she said, "after you have seen
+the bishop?"
+
+"Yes, at once. You mustn't let it worry you."
+
+"I feel as if I had cast off that kind of worry forever. It is only--the
+other worries from which we do not escape, from which we do not wish to
+escape."
+
+With a wonderful smile she had dropped his hands and gone in at the
+entrance, when a sound made them turn, the humming of a motor. And even
+as they looked it swung into Park Street.
+
+"It's a taxicab!" she said. As she spoke it drew up almost beside
+them, instead of turning in at the driveway, the door opened, and a man
+alighted.
+
+"Preston!" Alison exclaimed.
+
+He started, turning from the driver, whom he was about to pay. As for
+Hodder, he was not only undergoing a certain shock through the
+sudden contact, at such a moment, with Alison's brother: there was an
+additional shock that this was Alison's brother and Eldon Parr's son.
+Not that his appearance was shocking, although the well-clad, athletic
+figure was growing a trifle heavy, and the light from the side lamps of
+the car revealed dissipation in a still handsome face. The effect was
+a subtler one, not to be analyzed, and due to a multitude of
+preconceptions.
+
+Alison came forward.
+
+"This is Mr. Hodder, Preston," she said simply.
+
+For a moment Preston continued to stare at the rector without speaking.
+Suddenly he put out his hand.
+
+"Mr. Hodder, of St. John's?" he demanded.
+
+"Yes," answered Hodder. His surprise deepened to perplexity at the
+warmth of the handclasp that followed.
+
+A smile that brought back vividly to Hodder the sunny expression of the
+schoolboy in the picture lightened the features of the man.
+
+"I'm very glad to see you," he said, in a tone that left no doubt of its
+genuine quality.
+
+"Thank you," Hodder replied, meeting his eye with kindness, yet with
+a scrutiny that sought to penetrate the secret of an unexpected
+cordiality. "I, too, have hoped to see you."
+
+Alison, who stood by wondering, felt a meaning behind the rector's
+words. She pressed his hand as he bade her, once more, good night.
+
+"Won't you take my taxicab?" asked Preston. "It is going down town
+anyway."
+
+"I think I'd better stick to the street cars," Hodder said. His refusal
+was not ungraceful, but firm. Preston did not insist.
+
+In spite of the events of that evening, which he went over again and
+again as the midnight car carried him eastward, in spite of a new-born
+happiness the actuality of which was still difficult to grasp, Hodder
+was vaguely troubled when he thought of Preston Parr.
+
+
+
+
+Volume 8.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII. RETRIBUTION
+
+
+I
+
+The Bishop's House was a comfortable, double dwelling of a smooth,
+bright red brick and large, plate-glass windows, situated in a plot at
+the western end of Waverley Place. It had been bought by the Diocese
+in the nineties, and was representative of that transitional period in
+American architecture when the mansard roof had been repudiated, when
+as yet no definite types had emerged to take its place. The house had
+pointed gables, and a tiny and utterly useless porch that served only
+to darken the front door, made of heavy pieces of wood fantastically
+curved.
+
+It was precisely ten o'clock in the morning when Hodder rang the bell
+and was shown into the ample study which he had entered on other
+and less vital occasions. He found difficulty in realizing that this
+pleasant room, lined with well-worn books and overlooking a back lawn
+where the clothes of the episcopal family hung in the yellow autumn sun,
+was to be his judgment seat, whence he might be committed to trial for
+heresy.
+
+And this was the twentieth century! The full force of the preposterous
+fact smote him, and a consciousness of the distance he himself had
+travelled since the comparatively recent days of his own orthodoxy. And
+suddenly he was full again of a resentful impatience, not only that he
+should be called away from his labours, his cares, the strangers who
+were craving his help, to answer charges of such an absurd triviality,
+but that the performance of the great task to which he had set his hand,
+with God's help, should depend upon it. Would his enemies be permitted
+to drive him out thus easily?
+
+The old bishop came in, walking by the aid of a cane. He smiled at
+Hodder, who greeted him respectfully, and bidding him sit down, took
+a chair himself behind his writing table, from whence he gazed awhile
+earnestly and contemplatively at the rugged features and strong
+shoulders of the rector of St. John's. The effect of the look was that
+of a visual effort to harmonize the man with the deed he had done,
+the stir he had created in the city and the diocese; to readjust
+impressions.
+
+A hint of humour crept into the bishop's blue eyes, which were watery,
+yet strong, with heavy creases in the corners. He indicated by a little
+gesture three bundles of envelopes, bound by rubber bands, on the corner
+of his blotter.
+
+"Hodder," he said, "see what a lot of trouble you have made for me in my
+old age! All those are about you."
+
+The rector's expression could not have been deemed stern, but it had met
+the bishop's look unflinchingly. Now it relaxed into a responding smile,
+which was not without seriousness.
+
+"I am sorry, sir," Hodder answered, "to have caused you any worry--or
+inconvenience."
+
+"Perhaps," said the bishop, "I have had too much smooth sailing for a
+servant of Christ. Indeed, I have come to that conclusion."
+
+Hodder did not reply. He was moved, even more by the bishop's manner
+and voice than his words. And the opening to their conversation was
+unexpected. The old man put on his spectacles, and drew from the top of
+one of the bundles a letter.
+
+"This is from one of your vestrymen, Mr. Gordon Atterbury," he said, and
+proceeded to read it, slowly. When he had finished he laid it down.
+
+"Is that, according to your recollection, Mr. Hodder, a fairly accurate
+summary of the sermon you gave when you resumed the pulpit at the end of
+the summer?"
+
+"Yes, sir," answered the rector, "it is surprisingly accurate, with the
+exception of two or three inferences which I shall explain at the proper
+moment."
+
+"Mr. Atterbury is to be congratulated on his memory," the bishop
+observed a little dryly. "And he has saved me the trouble of reading
+more. Now what are the inferences to which you object?"
+
+Hodder stated them. "The most serious one," he added, "is that which he
+draws from my attitude on the virgin birth. Mr. Atterbury insists, like
+others who cling to that dogma, that I have become what he vaguely calls
+an Unitarian. He seems incapable of grasping my meaning, that the only
+true God the age knows, the world has ever known, is the God in Christ,
+is the Spirit in Christ, and is there not by any material proof, but
+because we recognize it spiritually. And that doctrine and dogma,
+ancient speculations as to how, definitely, that spirit came to be in
+Christ, are fruitless and mischievous to-day. Mr. Atterbury and others
+seem actually to resent my identification of our Lord's Spirit with the
+social conscience as well as the individual conscience of our time."
+
+The bishop nodded.
+
+"Hodder," he demanded abruptly, leaning forward over his desk, "how did
+this thing happen?"
+
+"You mean, sir--"
+
+There was, in the bishop's voice, a note almost pathetic. "Oh, I do not
+mean to ask you anything you may deem too personal. And God forbid, as I
+look at you, as I have known you, that I should doubt your sincerity. I
+am not your inquisitor, but your bishop and your friend, and I am asking
+for your confidence. Six months ago you were, apparently, one of the
+most orthodox rectors in the diocese. I recognize that you are not an
+impulsive, sensational man, and I am all the more anxious to learn from
+your own lips something of the influences, of the processes which have
+changed you, which have been strong enough to impel you to risk the
+position you have achieved."
+
+By this unlooked-for appeal Hodder was not only disarmed, but smitten
+with self-reproach at the thought of his former misjudgment and
+underestimation of the man in whose presence he sat. And it came over
+him, not only the extent to which, formerly, he had regarded the bishop
+as too tolerant and easygoing, but the fact that he had arrived here
+today prepared to find in his superior anything but the attitude he was
+showing. Considering the bishop's age, Hodder had been ready for a lack
+of understanding of the step he had taken, even for querulous reproaches
+and rebuke.
+
+He had, therefore, to pull himself together, to adjust himself to the
+unexpected greatness of soul with which he was being received before he
+began to sketch the misgivings he had felt from the early days of his
+rectorship of St. John's; the helplessness and failure which by degrees
+had come over him. He related how it had become apparent to him that
+by far the greater part of his rich and fashionable congregation
+were Christians only in name, who kept their religion in a small and
+impervious compartment where it did not interfere with their lives. He
+pictured the yearning and perplexity of those who had come to him for
+help, who could not accept the old explanations, and had gone away
+empty; and he had not been able to make Christians of the poor who
+attended the parish house. Finally, trusting in the bishop's discretion,
+he spoke of the revelations he had unearthed in Dalton Street, and how
+these had completely destroyed his confidence in the Christianity he had
+preached, and how he had put his old faith to the test of unprejudiced
+modern criticism, philosophy, and science...
+
+The bishop listened intently, his head bent, his eyes on he rector.
+
+"And you have come out--convinced?" he asked tremulously. "Yes, yes, I
+see you have. It is enough."
+
+He relapsed into thought, his wrinkled hand lying idly on the table.
+
+"I need not tell you, my friend," he resumed at length, "that a great
+deal of pressure has been brought to bear upon me in this matter, more
+than I have ever before experienced. You have mortally offended, among
+others, the most powerful layman in the diocese, Mr. Parr, who complains
+that you have presumed to take him to task concerning his private
+affairs."
+
+"I told him," answered Holder, "that so long as he continued to live the
+life he leads, I could not accept his contributions to St. John's."
+
+"I am an old man," said the bishop, "and whatever usefulness I have had
+is almost finished. But if I were young to-day, I should pray God for
+the courage and insight you have shown, and I am thankful to have lived
+long enough to have known you. It has, at least, been given one to
+realize that times have changed, that we are on the verge of a mighty
+future. I will be frank to say that ten years ago, if this had happened,
+I should have recommended you for trial. Now I can only wish you
+Godspeed. I, too, can see the light, my friend. I can see, I think,
+though dimly, the beginnings of a blending of all sects, of all
+religions in the increasing vision of the truth revealed in Jesus
+Christ, stripped, as you say, of dogma, of fruitless attempts at
+rational explanation. In Japan and China, in India and Persia, as well
+as in Christian countries, it is coming, coming by some working of the
+Spirit the mystery of which is beyond us. And nations and men who even
+yet know nothing of the Gospels are showing a willingness to adopt what
+is Christ's, and the God of Christ."
+
+Holder was silent, from sheer inability to speak.
+
+"If you had needed an advocate with me," the bishop continued, "you
+could not have had one to whose counsel I would more willingly have
+listened, than that of Horace Bentley. He wrote asking to come and see
+me, but I went to him in Dalton Street the day I returned. And it gives
+me satisfaction, Mr. Holder, to confess to you freely that he has taught
+me, by his life, more of true Christianity than I have learned in all my
+experience elsewhere."
+
+"I had thought," exclaimed the rector, wonderingly, "that I owed him
+more than any other man."
+
+"There are many who think that--hundreds, I should say," the bishop
+replied.... "Eldon Parr ruined him, drove him from the church.... It
+is strange how, outside of the church, his influence has silently and
+continuously grown until it has borne fruit in--this. Even now," he
+added after a pause, "the cautiousness, the dread of change which comes
+with old age might, I think, lead me to be afraid of it if I--didn't
+perceive behind it the spirit of Horace Bentley."
+
+It struck Holder, suddenly, what an unconscious but real source of
+confidence this thought had likewise been to him. He spoke of it.
+
+"It is not that I wouldn't trust you," the bishop went on. "I have
+watched you, I have talked to Asa Waring, I have read the newspapers. In
+spite of it all, you have kept your head, you have not compromised the
+dignity of the Church. But oh, my friend, I beg you to bear in mind
+that you are launched upon deep waters, that you have raised up many
+enemies--enemies of Christ--who seek to destroy you. You are still
+young. And the uncompromising experiment to which you are pledged,
+of freeing your church, of placing her in the position of power and
+influence in the community which is rightfully hers, is as yet untried.
+And no stone will be left unturned to discourage and overcome you. You
+have faith,--you have made me feel it as you sat here,--a faith which
+will save you from bitterness in personal defeat. You may not reap the
+victory, or even see it in your lifetime. But of this I am sure, that
+you will be able to say, with Paul, 'I have planted, Apollos watered,
+but God gave the increase.' Whatever happens, you may count upon my
+confidence and support. I can only wish that I were younger, that my arm
+were stronger, and that I had always perceived the truth as clearly as I
+see it now."
+
+Holder had risen involuntarily while these words were being spoken. They
+were indeed a benediction, and the intensity of his feeling warned him
+of the inadequacy of any reply. They were pronounced in sorrow, yet
+in hope, and they brought home to him, sharply, the nobility of the
+bishop's own sacrifice.
+
+"And you, sir?" he asked.
+
+"Ah," answered the bishop, "with this I shall have had my life. I am
+content...."
+
+"You will come to me again, Hodder? some other day," he said, after
+an interval, "that we may talk over the new problems. They are
+constructive, creative, and I am anxious to hear how you propose to
+meet them. For one thing, to find a new basis for the support of such a
+parish. I understand they have deprived you of your salary."
+
+"I have enough to live on, for a year or so," replied the rector,
+quickly. "Perhaps more."
+
+"I'm afraid," said the bishop, with a smile in his old eyes, "that you
+will need it, my friend. But who can say? You have strength, you have
+confidence, and God is with you."
+
+
+
+II
+
+Life, as Hodder now grasped it, was a rapidly whirling wheel which gave
+him no chance to catch up with the impressions and experiences through
+which it was dragging him. Here, for instance, were two far-reaching
+and momentous events, one crowding upon the other, and not an hour for
+reflection, realization, or adjustment! He had, indeed, after his return
+from the bishop's, snatched a few minutes to write Alison the unexpected
+result of that interview. But even as he wrote and rang for a messenger
+to carry the note to Park Street, he was conscious of an effort to seize
+upon and hold the fact that the woman he had so intensely desired was
+now his helpmate; and had, of her own freewill, united herself with him.
+A strong sense of the dignity of their relationship alone prevented his
+calling her on the telephone--as it doubtless had prevented her. While
+she remained in her father's house, he could not...
+
+In the little room next to the office several persons were waiting to
+see him. But as he went downstairs he halted on the landing, his hand
+going to his forehead, a reflex movement significant of a final attempt
+to achieve the hitherto unattainable feat of imagining her as his wife.
+If he might only speak to her again--now, this morning! And yet he
+knew that he needed no confirmation. The reality was there, in the
+background; and though refusing to come forward to be touched, it had
+already grafted itself as an actual and vital part of his being, never
+to be eliminated.
+
+Characteristically perfecting his own ideal, she had come to him in the
+hour when his horizon had been most obscure. And he experienced now an
+exultation, though solemn and sacred, that her faith had so far been
+rewarded in the tidings he now confided to the messenger. He was not, as
+yet, to be driven out from the task, to be deprived of the talent, the
+opportunity intrusted to him by Lord--the emancipation of the parish of
+St. John's.
+
+The first to greet him, when he entered his office, was one who, unknown
+to himself, had been fighting the battle of the God in Christ, and
+who now, thanks to John Hodder, had identified the Spirit as the
+transforming force. Bedloe Hubbell had come to offer his services to the
+Church. The tender was unqualified.
+
+"I should even be willing, Mr. Hodder," he said with a smile, "to
+venture occasionally into a pulpit. You have not only changed my
+conception of religion, but you have made it for me something which I
+can now speak about naturally."
+
+Hodder was struck by the suggestion.
+
+"Ah, we shall need the laymen in the pulpits, Mr. Hubbell," he said
+quickly. "A great spiritual movement must be primarily a lay movement.
+And I promise you you shall not lack for opportunity."
+
+
+
+III
+
+At nine o'clock that evening, when a reprieve came, Hodder went out.
+Anxiety on the score of Kate Marcy, as well as a desire to see Mr.
+Bentley and tell him of the conversation with the bishop, directed his
+steps toward Dalton Street. And Hodder had, indeed, an intention of
+confiding to his friend, as one eminently entitled to it, the news of
+his engagement to Alison Parr.
+
+Nothing, however, had been heard of Kate. She was not in Dalton Street,
+Mr. Bentley feared. The search of Gratz, the cabinet-maker, had been
+fruitless. And Sally Grover had even gone to see the woman in the
+hospital, whom Kate had befriended, in the hope of getting a possible
+clew. They sat close together before the fire in Mr. Bentley's
+comfortable library, debating upon the possibility of other methods of
+procedure, when a carriage was heard rattling over the pitted asphalt
+without. As it pulled up at the curb, a silence fell between them. The
+door-bell rang.
+
+Holder found himself sitting erect, rigidly attentive, listening to the
+muffled sound of a woman's voice in the entry. A few moments later came
+a knock at the library door, and Sam entered. The old darky was plainly
+frightened.
+
+"It's Miss Kate, Marse Ho'ace, who you bin tryin' to fin'," he
+stammered.
+
+Holder sprang to his feet and made his way rapidly around the table,
+where he stood confronting the woman in the doorway. There she was,
+perceptibly swaying, as though the floor under her were rocked by an
+earthquake. Her handsome face was white as chalk, her pupils widened in
+terror. It was curious, at such an instant, that he should have taken
+in her costume,--yet it was part of the mystery. She wore a new,
+close-fitting, patently expensive suit of dark blue cloth and a small
+hat, which were literally transforming in their effect, demanding a
+palpable initial effort of identification.
+
+He seized her by the arm.
+
+"What is it?" he demanded.
+
+"Oh, my God!" she cried. "He--he's out there--in the carriage."
+
+She leaned heavily against the doorpost, shivering.... Holder saw Sally
+Grover coming down the stairs.
+
+"Take her," he said, and went out of the front door, which Sam had left
+open. Mr. Bentley was behind him.
+
+The driver had descended from the box and was peering into the darkness
+of the vehicle when he heard them, and turned. At sight of the tall
+clergyman, an expression of relief came into his face.
+
+"I don't like the looks of this, sir," he said. "I thought he was pretty
+bad when I went to fetch him--"
+
+Holder pushed past him and looked into the carriage. Leaning back,
+motionless, in the corner of the seat was the figure of a man. For a
+terrible moment of premonition, of enlightenment, the rector gazed at
+it.
+
+"They sent for me from a family hotel in Ayers Street," the driver was
+explaining. Mr. Bentley's voice interrupted him.
+
+"He must be brought in, at once. Do you know where Dr. Latimer's office
+is, on Tower Street?" he asked the man. "Go there, and bring this doctor
+back with you as quickly as possible. If he is not in, get another,
+physician."
+
+Between them, the driver and Holder got the burden out of the carriage
+and up the steps. The light from the hallway confirmed the rector's
+fear.
+
+"It's Preston Parr," he said.
+
+The next moment was too dreadful for surprise, but never had the sense
+of tragedy so pierced the innermost depths of Holder's being as now,
+when Horace Bentley's calmness seemed to have forsaken him; and as he
+gazed down upon the features on the pillow, he wept.... Holder turned
+away. Whatever memories those features evoked, memories of a past that
+still throbbed with life these were too sacred for intrusion. The years
+of exile, of uncomplaining service to others in this sordid street and
+over the wide city had not yet sufficed to allay the pain, to heal the
+wound of youth. Nay, loyalty had kept it fresh--a loyalty that was the
+handmaid of faith...
+
+The rector softly left the room, only to be confronted with another
+harrowing scene in the library, where a frantic woman was struggling in
+Sally Grover's grasp. He went to her assistance... Words of comfort, of
+entreaty were of no avail,--Kate Marcy did not seem to hear them. Hers,
+in contrast to that other, was the unmeaning grief, the overwhelming
+sense of injustice of the child; and with her regained physical strength
+the two had all they could do to restrain her.
+
+"I will go to him," she sobbed, between her paroxysms, "you've got
+no right to keep me--he's mine... he came back to me--he's all I ever
+had...."
+
+So intent were they that they did not notice Mr. Bentley standing beside
+them until they heard his voice.
+
+"What she says is true," he told them. "Her place is in there. Let her
+go."
+
+Kate Marcy raised her head at the words, and looked at him a strange,
+half-comprehending, half-credulous gaze. They released her, helped her
+towards the bedroom, and closed the door gently behind her... The three
+sat in silence until the carriage was heard returning, and the doctor
+entered.
+
+The examination was brief, and two words, laconically spoken, sufficed
+for an explanation--apoplexy, alcohol. The prostrate, quivering woman
+was left where they had found her.
+
+Dr. Latimer was a friend of Mr. Bentley's, and betrayed no surprise at a
+situation which otherwise might have astonished him. It was only when
+he learned the dead man's name, and his parentage, that he looked up
+quickly from his note book.
+
+"The matter can be arranged without a scandal," he said, after an
+instant. "Can you tell me something of the circumstances?"
+
+It was Hodder who answered.
+
+"Preston Parr had been in love with this woman, and separated from her.
+She was under Mr. Bentley's care when he found her again, I infer, by
+accident. From what the driver says, they were together in a hotel in
+Ayers Street, and he died after he had been put in a carriage. In her
+terror, she was bringing him to Mr. Bentley."
+
+The doctor nodded.
+
+"Poor woman!" he said unexpectedly. "Will you be good enough to let Mr.
+Parr know that I will see him at his house, to-night?" he added, as he
+took his departure.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Sally Grower went out with the physician, and it was Mr. Bentley who
+answered the question in the rector's mind, which he hesitated to ask.
+
+"Mr. Parr must come here," he said.
+
+As the rector turned, mechanically, to pick up his hat, Mr. Bentley
+added,
+
+"You will come back, Hodder?"
+
+"Since you wish it, sir," the rector said.
+
+Once in the street, he faced a predicament, but swiftly decided that the
+telephone was impossible under the circumstances, that there could be
+no decent procedure without going himself to Park Street. It was only
+a little after ten. The electric car which he caught seemed to lag, the
+stops were interminable. His thoughts flew hither and thither. Should he
+try first to see Alison? He was nearest to her now of all the world, and
+he could not suffer the thought of her having the news otherwise. Yes,
+he must tell her, since she knew nothing of the existence of Kate Marcy.
+
+Having settled that,--though the thought of the blow she was to receive
+lay like a weight on his heart,--Mr. Bentley's reason for summoning
+Eldon Parr to Dalton Street came to him. That the feelings of Mr.
+Bentley towards the financier were those of Christian forgiveness was
+not for a moment to be doubted: but a meeting, particularly under such
+circumstances, could not but be painful indeed. It must be, it was,
+Hodder saw, for Kate Marcy's sake; yes, and for Eldon Parr's as well,
+that he be given this opportunity to deal with the woman whom he had
+driven away from his son, and ruined.
+
+The moon, which had shed splendours over the world the night before,
+was obscured by a low-drifting mist as Hodder turned in between the
+ornamental lamps that marked the gateway of the Park Street mansion,
+and by some undiscerned thought--suggestion he pictured the heart-broken
+woman he had left beside the body of one who had been heir to all
+this magnificence. Useless now, stone and iron and glass, pictures and
+statuary. All the labour, all the care and cunning, all the stealthy
+planning to get ahead of others had been in vain! What indeed were left
+to Eldon Parr! It was he who needed pity,--not the woman who had sinned
+and had been absolved because of her great love; not the wayward,
+vice-driven boy who lay dead. The very horror of what Eldon Parr was now
+to suffer turned Hodder cold as he rang the bell and listened for the
+soft tread of the servant who would answer his summons.
+
+The man who flung open the door knew him, and did not conceal his
+astonishment.
+
+"Will you take my card to Miss Parr," the rector said, "if she has not
+retired, and tell her I have a message?"
+
+"Miss Parr is still in the library, sir."
+
+"Alone?"
+
+"Yes, sir." The man preceded him, but before his name had been announced
+Alison was standing, her book in her hand, gazing at him with startled
+eyes, his name rising, a low cry, to her lips.
+
+"John!"
+
+He took the book from her, gently, and held her hands.
+
+"Something has happened!" she said. "Tell me--I can bear it."
+
+He saw instantly that her dread was for him, and it made his task the
+harder.
+
+"It's your brother, Alison."
+
+"Preston! What is it? He's done something----"
+
+Hodder shook his head.
+
+"He died--to-night. He is at Mr. Bentley's."
+
+It was like her that she did not cry out, or even speak, but stood
+still, her hands tightening on his, her breast heaving. She was not, he
+knew, a woman who wept easily, and her eyes were dry. And he had it to
+be thankful for that it was given him to be with her, in this sacred
+relationship, at such a moment. But even now, such was the mystery that
+ever veiled her soul, he could not read her feelings, nor know what
+these might be towards the brother whose death he announced.
+
+"I want to tell you, first, Alison, to prepare you," he said.
+
+Her silence was eloquent. She looked up at him bravely, trustfully, in a
+way that made him wince. Whatever the exact nature of her suffering, it
+was too deep for speech. And yet she helped him, made it easier for him
+by reason of her very trust, once given not to be withdrawn. It gave him
+a paradoxical understanding of her which was beyond definition.
+
+"You must know--you would have sometime to know that there was a woman
+he loved, whom he intended to marry--but she was separated from him. She
+was not what is called a bad woman, she was a working girl. I found her,
+this summer, and she told me the story, and she has been under the care
+of Mr. Bentley. She disappeared two or three days ago. Your brother
+met her again, and he was stricken with apoplexy while with her this
+evening. She brought him to Mr. Bentley's house."
+
+"My father--bought her and sent her away."
+
+"You knew?"
+
+"I heard a little about it at the time, by accident. I have always
+remembered it.... I have always felt that something like this would
+happen."
+
+Her sense of fatality, another impression she gave of living in the
+deeper, instinctive currents of life, had never been stronger upon him
+than now.... She released his hands.
+
+"How strange," she said, "that the end should have come at Mr.
+Bentley's! He loved my mother--she was the only woman he ever loved."
+
+It came to Hodder as the completing touch of the revelation he had half
+glimpsed by the bedside.
+
+"Ah," he could not help exclaiming, "that explains much."
+
+She had looked at him again, through sudden tears, as though divining
+his reference to Mr. Bentley's grief, when a step make them turn. Eldon
+Parr had entered the room. Never, not even in that last interview, had
+his hardness seemed so concretely apparent as now. Again, pity seemed
+never more out of place, yet pity was Hodder's dominant feeling as
+he met the coldness, the relentlessness of the glance. The thing that
+struck him, that momentarily kept closed his lips, was the awful,
+unconscious timeliness of the man's entrance, and his unpreparedness to
+meet the blow that was to crush him.
+
+"May I ask, Mr. Hodder," he said, in an unemotional voice, "what you are
+doing in this house?"
+
+Still Hodder hesitated, an unwilling executioner.
+
+"Father," said Alison, "Mr. Hodder has come with a message."
+
+Never, perhaps, had Eldon Parr given such complete proof of his lack of
+spiritual intuition. The atmosphere, charged with presage for him, gave
+him nothing.
+
+"Mr. Hodder takes a strange way of delivering it," was his comment.
+
+Mercy took precedence over her natural directness. She laid her hand
+gently on his arm. And she had, at that instant, no thought of the long
+years he had neglected her for her brother.
+
+"It's about--Preston," she said.
+
+"Preston!" The name came sharply from Eldon Parr's lips. "What about
+him? Speak, can't you?"
+
+"He died this evening," said Alison, simply.
+
+Hodder plainly heard the ticking of the clock on the mantel.... And the
+drama that occurred was the more horrible because it was hidden; played,
+as it were, behind closed doors. For the spectators, there was only the
+black wall, and the silence. Eldon Parr literally did nothing,--made no
+gesture, uttered no cry. The death, they knew, was taking place in
+his soul, yet the man stood before them, naturally, for what seemed an
+interminable time....
+
+"Where is he?" he asked.
+
+"At Mr. Bentley's, in Dalton Street." It was Alison who replied again.
+
+Even then he gave no sign that he read retribution in the coincidence,
+betrayed no agitation at the mention of a name which, in such a
+connection, might well have struck the terror of judgment into his
+heart. They watched him while, with a firm step, he crossed the room and
+pressed a button in the wall, and waited.
+
+"I want the closed automobile, at once," he said, when the servant came.
+
+"I beg pardon; sir, but I think Gratton has gone to bed. He had no
+orders."
+
+"Then wake him," said Eldon Parr, "instantly. And send for my
+secretary."
+
+With a glance which he perceived Alison comprehended, Hodder made his
+way out of the room. He had from Eldon Parr, as he passed him, neither
+question, acknowledgment, nor recognition. Whatever the banker
+might have felt, or whether his body had now become a mere machine
+mechanically carrying on a life-long habit of action, the impression was
+one of the tremendousness of the man's consistency. A great effort was
+demanded to summon up the now almost unimaginable experience of his
+confidence; of the evening when, almost on that very spot, he had
+revealed to Hodder the one weakness of his life. And yet the effort was
+not to be, presently, without startling results. In the darkness of the
+street the picture suddenly grew distinct on the screen of the rector's
+mind, the face of the banker subtly drawn with pain as he had looked
+down on it in compassion; the voice with its undercurrent of agony:
+
+"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."
+
+
+
+V
+
+So swift was the trolley that ten minutes had elapsed, after Hodder's
+arrival, before the purr of an engine and the shriek of a brake broke
+the stillness of upper Dalton Street and announced the stopping of a
+heavy motor before the door. The rector had found Mr. Bentley in the
+library, alone, seated with bent head in front of the fire, and had
+simply announced the intention of Eldon Parr to come. From the chair
+Hodder had unobtrusively chosen, near the window, his eyes rested on the
+noble profile of his friend. What his thoughts were, Hodder could not
+surmise; for he seemed again, marvellously, to have regained the outward
+peace which was the symbol of banishment from the inner man of all
+thought of self.
+
+"I have prepared her for Mr. Parr's coming," he said to Hodder at
+length.
+
+And yet he had left her there! Hodder recalled the words Mr. Bentley had
+spoken, "It is her place." Her place, the fallen woman's, the place she
+had earned by a great love and a great renunciation, of which no earthly
+power might henceforth deprive her....
+
+Then came the motor, the ring at the door, the entrance of Eldon Parr
+into the library. He paused, a perceptible moment, on the threshold
+as his look fell upon the man whom he had deprived of home and
+fortune,--yes and of the one woman in the world for them both. Mr.
+Bentley had risen, and stood facing him. That shining, compassionate
+gaze should have been indeed a difficult one to meet. Vengeance was
+the Lord's, in truth! What ordeal that Horace Bentley in anger and
+retribution might have devised could have equalled this!
+
+And yet Eldon Parr did meet it--with an effort. Hodder, from his corner,
+detected the effort, though it were barely discernible, and would have
+passed a scrutiny less rigid,--the first outward and visible sign of
+the lesion within. For a brief instant the banker's eyes encountered
+Mr. Bentley's look with a flash of the old defiance, and fell, and then
+swept the room.
+
+"Will you come this way, Mr. Parr?" Mr. Bentley said, indicating the
+door of the bedroom.
+
+Alison followed. Her eyes, wet with unheeded tears, had never left Mr.
+Bentley's face. She put out her hand to him....
+
+Eldon Parr had halted abruptly. He knew from Alison the circumstances
+in which his son had died, and how he had been brought hither to this
+house, but the sight of the woman beside the bed fanned into flame his
+fury against a world which had cheated him, by such ignominious means,
+of his dearest wish. He grew white with sudden passion.
+
+"What is she doing here?" he demanded.
+
+Kate Marcy, who had not seemed to hear his entrance, raised up to him
+a face from which all fear had fled, a face which, by its suggestive
+power, compelled him to realize the absolute despair clutching now at
+his own soul, and against which he was fighting wildly, hopelessly. It
+was lying in wait for him, With hideous patience, in the coming watches
+of the night. Perhaps he read in the face of this woman whom he had
+condemned to suffer all degradation, and over whom he was now powerless,
+something which would ultimately save her from the hell now yawning for
+him; a redeeming element in her grief of which she herself were not
+as yet conscious, a light shining in the darkness of her soul which in
+eternity would become luminous. And he saw no light for him--He thrashed
+in darkness. He had nothing, now, to give, no power longer to deprive.
+She had given all she possessed, the memorial of her kind which would
+outlast monuments.
+
+It was Alison who crossed the room swiftly. She laid her hand
+protectingly on Kate Marcy's shoulder, and stooped, and kissed her. She
+turned to her father.
+
+"It is her right," she said. "He belonged to her, not to us. And we must
+take her home with us.
+
+"No," answered Kate Marcy' "I don't want to go. I wouldn't live," she
+added with unexpected intensity, "with him."
+
+"You would live with me," said Alison.
+
+"I don't want to live!" Kate Marcy got up from the chair with an energy
+they had not thought her to possess, a revival of the spirit which had
+upheld her when she had contended, singly, with a remorseless world. She
+addressed herself to Eldon Parr. "You took him from me, and I was a fool
+to let you. He might have saved me and saved himself. I listened to you
+when you told me lies as to how it would ruin him.... Well,--I had him
+you never did."
+
+The sudden, intolerable sense of wrong done to her love, the swift anger
+which followed it, the justness of her claim of him who now lay in the
+dignity of death clothed her--who in life had been crushed and blotted
+out--with a dignity not to be gainsaid. In this moment of final
+self-assertion she became the dominating person in the room, knew for
+once the birthright of human worth. They watched her in silence as she
+turned and gave one last, lingering look at the features of the dead;
+stretched out her hand towards them, but did not touch them... and then
+went slowly towards the door. Beside Alison she stopped.
+
+"You are his sister?" she said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+She searched Alison's face, wistfully.
+
+"I could have loved you."
+
+"And can you not--still?"
+
+Kate Mercy did not answer the question.
+
+"It is because you understand," she said. "You're like those I've come
+to know--here. And you're like him.... I don't mean in looks. He, too,
+was good--and square." She spoke the words a little defiantly, as though
+challenging the verdict of the world. "And he wouldn't have been wild if
+he could have got going straight."
+
+"I know," said Alison, in a low voice.
+
+"Yes," said Kate Mercy, "you look as if you did. He thought a lot of
+you, he said he was only beginning to find out what you was. I'd like
+you to think as well of me as you can."
+
+"I could not think better," Alison replied.
+
+Kate Mercy shook her head.
+
+"I got about as low as any woman ever got," she said
+
+"Mr. Hodder will tell you. I want you to know that I wouldn't
+marry--your brother," she hesitated over the name. "He wanted me to--he
+was mad with me to night, because I wouldn't--when this happened."
+
+She snatched her hand free from Alison's, and fled out of the room, into
+the hallway.
+
+Eldon Parr had moved towards the bed, seemingly unaware of the words
+they had spoken. Perhaps, as he gazed upon the face, he remembered in
+his agony the sunny, smiling child who need to come hurrying down the
+steps in Ransome Street to meet him.
+
+In the library Mr. Bentley and John Hodder, knowing nothing of her
+flight, heard the front door close on Kate Marcy forever....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII. LIGHT
+
+
+I
+
+Two days after the funeral, which had taken place from Calvary, and not
+from St. John's, Hodder was no little astonished to receive a note from
+Eldon Parr's secretary requesting the rector to call in Park Street. In
+the same mail was a letter from Alison. "I have had," she wrote, "a talk
+with my father. The initiative was his. I should not have thought of
+speaking to him of my affairs so soon after Preston's death. It seems
+that he strongly suspected our engagement, which of course I at once
+acknowledged, telling him that it was your intention, at the proper
+time, to speak to him yourself.
+
+"I was surprised when he said he would ask you to call. I confess that I
+have not an idea of what he intends to say to you, John, but I trust you
+absolutely, as always. You will find him, already, terribly changed. I
+cannot describe it--you will see for yourself. And it has all seemed
+to happen so suddenly. As I wrote you, he sat up both nights, with
+Preston--he could not be induced to leave the room. And after the first
+night he was different. He has hardly spoken a word, except when he sent
+for me this evening, and he eats nothing.... And yet, somehow, I do not
+think that this will be the end. I feel that he will go on living.....
+
+"I did not realize how much he still hoped about Preston. And on Monday,
+when Preston so unexpectedly came home, he was happier than I have known
+him for years. It was strange and sad that he could not see, as I saw,
+that whatever will power my brother had had was gone. He could not read
+it in the face of his own son, who was so quick to detect it in all
+others! And then came the tragedy. Oh, John, do you think we shall ever
+find that girl again?--I know you are trying but we mustn't rest until
+we do. Do you think we ever shall? I shall never forgive myself for not
+following her out of the door, but, I thought she had gone to you and
+Mr. Bentley."
+
+Hodder laid the letter down, and took it up again. He knew that Alison
+felt, as he felt, that they never would find Kate Marcy.... He read on.
+
+"My father wished to speak to me about the money. He has plans for much
+of it, it appears, even now. Oh. John, he will never understand. I want
+so much to see you, to talk to you--there are times when I am actually
+afraid to be alone, and without you. If it be weakness to confess that
+I need your reassurance, your strength and comfort constantly, then I am
+weak. I once thought I could stand alone, that I had solved all problems
+for myself, but I know now how foolish I was. I have been face to face
+with such dreadful, unimagined things, and in my ignorance I did not
+conceive that life held such terrors. And when I look at my father, the
+thought of immortality turns me faint. After you have come here this
+afternoon there can be no longer any reason why we should not meet, and
+all the world know it. I will go with you to Mr. Bentley's.
+
+"Of course I need not tell you that I refused to inherit anything. But
+I believe I should have consented if I possibly could have done so. It
+seemed so cruel--I can think of no other word--to have, to refuse at
+such a moment. Perhaps I have been cruel to him all my life--I don't
+know. As I look back upon everything, all our relations, I cannot see
+how I could have been different. He wouldn't let me. I still believe to
+have stayed with him would have been a foolish and useless sacrifice...
+But he looked at me so queerly, as though he, too, had had a glimmering
+of what we might have been to each other after my mother died. Why is
+life so hard? And why are we always getting glimpses of things when it
+is too late? It is only honest to say that if I had it to do all over
+again, I should have left him as I did.
+
+"It is hard to write you this, but he actually made the condition of my
+acceptance of the inheritance that I should not marry you. I really do
+not believe I convinced him that you wouldn't have me take the money
+under any circumstances. And the dreadful side of it all was that I had
+to make it plain to him--after what has happened that my desire to marry
+you wasn't the main reason of my refusal. I had to tell him that even
+though you had not been in question, I couldn't have taken what he
+wished to give me, since it had not been honestly made. He asked me why
+I went on eating the food bought with such money, living under his roof?
+But I cannot, I will not leave him just yet.... It is two o'clock. I
+cannot write any more to-night."
+
+
+
+II
+
+The appointed time was at the November dusk, hurried forward nearly an
+hour by the falling panoply of smoke driven westward over the Park by
+the wet east wind. And the rector was conducted, with due ceremony, to
+the office upstairs which he had never again expected to enter, where
+that other memorable interview had taken place. The curtains were drawn.
+And if the green-shaded lamp--the only light in the room--had been
+arranged by a master of dramatic effect, it could not have better served
+the setting.
+
+In spite of Alison's letter, Holder was unprepared for the ravages a few
+days had made in the face of Eldon Parr. Not that he appeared older: the
+impression was less natural, more sinister. The skin had drawn sharply
+over the cheek-bones, and strangely the eyes both contradicted and
+harmonized with the transformation of the features. These, too, had
+changed. They were not dead and lustreless, but gleamed out of the
+shadowy caverns into which they had sunk, unyielding, indomitable in
+torment,--eyes of a spirit rebellious in the fumes....
+
+This spirit somehow produced the sensation of its being separated from
+the body, for the movement of the hand, inviting Holder to seat himself,
+seemed almost automatic.
+
+"I understand," said Eldon Parr, "that you wish to marry my daughter."
+
+"It is true that I am to marry Alison," Holder answered, "and that I
+intended, later on, to come to inform you of the fact."
+
+He did not mention the death of Preston. Condolences, under the
+circumstances, were utterly out of the question.
+
+"How do you propose to support her?" the banker demanded.
+
+"She is of age, and independent of you. You will pardon me if I reply
+that this is a matter between ourselves," Holder said.
+
+"I had made up my mind that the day she married you I would not only
+disinherit her, but refuse absolutely, to have anything to do with her."
+
+"If you cannot perceive what she perceives, that you have already by
+your own life cut her off from you absolutely and that seeing her will
+not mend matters while you remain relentless, nothing I can say will
+convince you." Holder did not speak rebukingly. The utter uselessness
+of it was never more apparent. The man was condemned beyond all present
+reprieve, at least.
+
+"She left me," exclaimed Eldon Parr, bitterly.
+
+"She left you, to save herself."
+
+"We need not discuss that."
+
+"I am far from wishing to discuss it," Holder replied.
+
+"I do not know why you have asked me to come here, Mr. Parr. It is clear
+that your attitude has not changed since our last conversation. I tried
+to make it plain to you why the church could not accept your money. Your
+own daughter, cannot accept it."
+
+"There was a time," retorted the banker, "when you did not refuse to
+accept it."
+
+"Yes," Holder replied, "that is true." It came to him vividly then that
+it had been Alison herself who had cast the enlightening gleam which
+revealed his inconsistency. But he did not defend himself.
+
+"I can see nothing in all this, Mr. Hodder, but a species of insanity,"
+said Eldon Parr, and there crept into his tone both querulousness and
+intense exasperation. "In the first place, you insist upon marrying my
+daughter when neither she nor you have any dependable means of support.
+She never spared her criticisms of me, and you presume to condemn me,
+a man who, if he has neglected his children, has done so because he has
+spent too much of his time in serving his community and his country, and
+who has--if I have to say it myself--built up the prosperity which you
+and others are doing your best to tear down, and which can only result
+in the spread of misery. You profess to have a sympathy with the masses,
+but you do not know them as I do. They cannot control themselves, they
+require a strong hand. But I am not asking for your sympathy. I have
+been misunderstood all my life, I have become used to ingratitude, even
+from my children, and from the rector of the church for which I have
+done more than any other man."
+
+Hodder stared at him in amazement.
+
+"You really believe that!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Believe it!" Eldon Parr repeated. "I have had my troubles, as heavy
+bereavements as a man can have. All of them, even this of my son's
+death, all the ingratitude and lack of sympathy I have experienced--"
+(he looked deliberately at Hodder) "have not prevented me, do not
+prevent me to-day from regarding my fortune as a trust. You have
+deprived St. John's, at least so long as you remain there, of some of
+its benefits, and the responsibility for that is on your own head. And I
+am now making arrangements to give to Calvary the settlement house which
+St. John's should have had."
+
+The words were spoken with such an air of conviction, of unconscious
+plausibility, as it were, that it was impossible for Hodder to doubt the
+genuineness of the attitude they expressed. And yet it was more than his
+mind could grasp.... Horace Bentley, Richard Garvin, and the miserable
+woman of the streets whom he had driven to destroy herself had made
+absolutely no impression whatever! The gifts, the benefactions of Eldon
+Parr to his fellow-men would go on as before!
+
+"You ask me why I sent for you," the banker went on. "It was primarily
+because I hoped to impress upon you the folly of marrying my daughter.
+And in spite of all the injury and injustice you have done me, I do not
+forget that you were once in a relationship to me which has been unique
+in my life. I trusted you, I admired you, for your ability, for your
+faculty of getting on with men. At that time you were wise enough not to
+attempt to pass comment upon accidents in business affairs which are, if
+deplorable, inevitable."
+
+Eldon Parr's voice gave a momentary sign of breaking.
+
+"I will be frank with you. My son's death has led me, perhaps weakly, to
+make one more appeal. You have ruined your career by these chimerical,
+socialistic notions you have taken up, and which you mistake for
+Christianity. As a practical man I can tell you, positively, that St.
+John's will run downhill until you are bankrupt. The people who come to
+you now are in search of a new sensation, and when that grows stale
+they will fall away. Even if a respectable number remain in your
+congregation, after this excitement and publicity have died down, I have
+reason to know that it is impossible to support a large city church on
+contributions. It has been tried again and again, and failed. You have
+borrowed money for the Church's present needs. When that is gone I
+predict that you will find it difficult to get more."
+
+This had every indication of being a threat, but Hodder, out of sheer
+curiosity, did not interrupt. And it was evident that the banker drew a
+wrong conclusion from his silence, which he may actually have taken for
+reluctant acquiescence. His tone grew more assertive.
+
+"The Church, Mr. Hodder, cannot do without the substantial business men.
+I have told the bishop so, but he is failing so rapidly from old age
+that I might as well not have wasted my breath. He needs an assistant, a
+suffragan or coadjutor, and I intend to make it my affair to see that he
+gets one. When I remember him as he was ten years ago, I find it hard to
+believe that he is touched with these fancies. To be charitable, it is
+senile decay. He seems to forget what I have done for him, personally,
+made up his salary, paid his expenses at different times, and no appeal
+for the diocese to me was ever in vain. But again, I will let that go.
+
+"What I am getting at is this. You have made a mess of the affairs of
+St. John's, you have made a mess of your life. I am willing to give you
+the credit for sincerity. Some of my friends might not be. You want to
+marry my daughter, and she is apparently determined to marry you. If you
+are sensible and resign from St. John's now I will settle on Alison a
+sufficient sum to allow you both to live in comfort and decency the
+rest of your lives. I will not have it said of me that I permitted my
+daughter to become destitute."
+
+After he had finished, the rector sat for so long a time that the banker
+nervously shifted in his chair. The clergyman's look had a cumulative
+quality, an intensity which seemed to increase as the silence continued.
+There was no anger in it, no fanaticism. On the contrary, the
+higher sanity of it was disturbing; and its extraordinary
+implication--gradually borne in upon Eldon Parr--was that he himself
+were not in his right mind. The words, when they came, were a
+confirmation of this inference.
+
+"It is what I feared, Mr. Parr," he said. "You are as yet incapable of
+comprehending."
+
+"What do you mean?" asked the banker, jerking his hand from the table.
+
+The rector shook his head.
+
+"If this great chastisement with which you have been visited has given
+you no hint of the true meaning of life, nothing I can say will avail.
+If you will not yet listen to the Spirit which is trying to make you
+comprehend, how then will you listen to me? How am I to open your eyes
+to the paradox of truth, that he who would save his life shall lose it,
+that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than
+for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God? If you will not believe
+him who said that, you will not believe me. I can only beg of you,
+strive to understand, that your heart many be softened, that your
+suffering soul may be released."
+
+It is to be recorded, strangely, that Eldon Parr did not grow angry in
+his turn. The burning eyes looked out at Hodder curiously, as at a
+being upon whom the vials of wrath were somehow wasted, against whom the
+weapons of power were of no account. The fanatic had become a phenomenon
+which had momentarily stilled passion to arouse interest... "Art thou a
+master of Israel, and knowest not these things?"
+
+"Do you mean to say"--such was the question that sprang to Eldon Parr's
+lips--"that you take the Bible literally? What is your point of view?
+You speak about the salvation of souls, I have heard that kind of talk
+all my life. And it is easy, I find, for men who have never known
+the responsibilities of wealth to criticize and advise. I regard
+indiscriminate giving as nothing less than a crime, and I have always
+tried to be painstaking and judicious. If I had taken the words you
+quoted at their face value, I should have no wealth to distribute
+to-day.
+
+"I, too, Mr. Hodder, odd as it may seem to you, have had my dreams--of
+doing my share of making this country the best place in the world to
+live in. It has pleased providence to take away my son. He was not
+fitted to carry on my work,--that is the way--with dreams. I was to
+have taught him to build up, and to give, as I have given. You think me
+embittered, hard, because I seek to do good, to interpret the Gospel in
+my own way. Before this year is out I shall have retired from all active
+business.
+
+"I intend to spend the rest of my life in giving away the money I have
+earned--all of it. I do not intend to spare myself, and giving will be
+harder than earning. I shall found institutions for research of disease,
+hospitals, playgrounds, libraries, and schools. And I shall make the
+university here one of the best in the country. What more, may I ask,
+would you have me do?"
+
+"Ah," replied the rector, "it is not what I would have you do. It is
+not, indeed, a question of 'doing,' but of seeing."
+
+"Of seeing?" the banker repeated. "As I say, of using judgment."
+
+"Judgment, yes, but the judgment which has not yet dawned for you, the
+enlightenment which is the knowledge of God's will. Worldly wisdom is a
+rule of thumb many men may acquire, the other wisdom, the wisdom of the
+soul, is personal--the reward of revelation which springs from desire.
+You ask me what I think you should do. I will tell you--but you will not
+do it, you will be powerless to do it unless you see it for yourself,
+unless the time shall come when you are willing to give up everything
+you have held dear in life,--not your money, but your opinions, the very
+judgment and wisdom you value, until you have gained the faith which
+proclaims these worthless, until you are ready to receive the Kingdom of
+God as a little child. You are not ready, now. Your attitude, your
+very words, proclaim your blindness to all that has happened you, your
+determination to carry out, so far as it is left to you, your own will.
+You may die without seeing."
+
+Crazy as it all sounded, a slight tremor shook Eldon Parr. There was
+something in the eyes, in the powerful features of the clergyman that
+kept him still, that made him listen with a fascination which had he
+taken cognizance of it--was akin to fear. That this man believed it,
+that he would impress it upon others, nay, had already done so, the
+banker did not then doubt.
+
+"You speak of giving," Hodder continued, "and you have nothing to
+give--nothing. You are poorer to-day than the humblest man who has seen
+God. But you have much, you have all to restore." Without raising his
+voice, the rector had contrived to put a mighty emphasis on the word.
+"You speak of the labour of giving, but if you seek your God and haply
+find him you will not rest night or day while you live until you have
+restored every dollar possible of that which you have wrongfully taken
+from others."
+
+John Hodder rose and raised his arm in effective protest against the
+interruption Eldon Parr was about to make. He bore him down.
+
+"I know what you are going to say, Mr. Parr,--that it is not practical.
+That word 'practical' is the barrier between you and your God. I tell
+you that God can make anything practical. Your conscience, the spirit,
+tortures you to-day, but you have not had enough torture, you still
+think to escape easily, to keep the sympathy of a world which despises
+you. You are afraid to do what God would have you do. You have the
+opportunity, through grace, by your example to leave the world better
+than you found it, to do a thing of such magnitude as is given to few
+men, to confess before all that your life has been blind and wicked.
+That is what the Spirit is trying to teach you. But you fear the
+ridicule of the other blind men, you have not the faith to believe
+that many eyes would be opened by your act. The very shame of such a
+confession, you think, is not to be borne."
+
+"Suppose I acknowledge, which I do not, your preposterous charge, how
+would you propose to do this thing?"
+
+"It is very simple," said the rector, "so far as the actual method of
+procedure goes. You have only to establish a board of men in whom you
+have confidence,--a court of claims, so to speak,--to pass upon the
+validity of every application, not from a business standpoint alone, but
+from one of a broad justice and equity. And not only that. I should
+have it an important part of the duties of this board to discover
+for themselves other claimants who may not, for various reasons, come
+forward. In the case of the Consolidated Tractions, for instances there
+are doubtless many men like Garvin who invested their savings largely
+on the strength of your name. You cannot bring him back to life, restore
+him to his family as he was before you embittered him, but it would be
+a comparatively easy matter to return to his widow, with compound
+interest, the sum which he invested."
+
+"For the sake of argument," said Eldon Parr, "what would you do with the
+innumerable impostors who would overwhelm such a board with claims that
+they had bought and sold stock at a loss? And that is only one case I
+could mention."
+
+"Would it be so dreadful a thing," asked Hodder, "To run the risk of
+making a few mistakes? It would not be business, you say. If you had the
+desire to do this, you would dismiss such an obsession from your brain,
+you would prefer to err on the aide of justice and mercy. And no matter
+how able your board, in making restitution you could at best expect to
+mend only a fraction of the wrongs you have done."
+
+"I shall waive, for the moment, my contention that the Consolidated
+Tractions Company, had it succeeded, would greatly have benefited the
+city. Even if it had been the iniquitous, piratical transaction you
+suggest, why should I assume the responsibility for all who were
+concerned in it?"
+
+"If the grace were given you to do this, that question would answer
+itself," the rector replied. "The awful sense of responsibility, which
+you now lack, would overwhelm you."
+
+"You have made me out a rascal and a charlatan," said Eldon Parr, "and I
+have listened' patiently in my desire to be fair, to learn from your
+own lips whether there were anything in the extraordinary philosophy you
+have taken up, and which you are pleased to call Christianity. If you
+will permit me to be as frank as you have been, it appears to me as
+sheer nonsense and folly, and if it were put into practice the world
+would be reduced at once to chaos and anarchy."
+
+"There is no danger, I am sorry to say, of its being put into practice
+at once," said Hodder, smiting sadly.
+
+"I hope not," answered the banker, dryly. "Utopia is a dream in which
+those who do the rough work of the world cannot afford to indulge. And
+there is one more question. You will, no doubt, deride it as practical,
+but to my mind it is very much to the point. You condemn the business
+practices in which I have engaged all my life as utterly unchristian. If
+you are logical, you will admit that no man or woman who owns stock in a
+modern corporation is, according to your definition, Christian, and, to
+use your own phrase, can enter the Kingdom of God. I can tell you, as
+one who knows, that there is no corporation in this country which, in
+the struggle to maintain itself, is not forced to adopt the natural
+law of the survival of the fittest, which you condemn. Your own salary,
+while you had it, came from men who had made the money in corporations.
+Business is business, and admits of no sentimental considerations. If
+you can get around that fact, I will gladly bow to your genius. Should
+you succeed in reestablishing St. John's on what you call a free
+basis--and in my opinion you will not--even then the money, you would
+live on, and which supported the church, would be directly or indirectly
+derived from corporations."
+
+"I do not propose to enter into an economics argument with you, Mr.
+Parr, but if you tell me that the flagrant practices indulged in by
+those who organized the Consolidated Tractions Company can be excused
+under any code of morals, any conception of Christianity, I tell you
+they cannot. What do we see today in your business world? Boards of
+directors, trusted by stockholders, betraying their trust, withholding
+information in order to profit thereby, buying and selling stock
+secretly; stock watering, selling to the public diluted values,--all
+kinds of iniquity and abuse of power which I need not go into. Do you
+mean to tell me, on the plea that business is business and hence
+a department by itself, that deception, cheating, and stealing are
+justified and necessary? The awakened conscience of the public is
+condemning you.
+
+"The time is at hand, though neither you nor I may live to see it,
+when the public conscience itself is beginning to perceive thin higher
+justice hidden from you. And you are attempting to mislead when you
+do not distinguish between the men who, for their own gain and power,
+mismanage such corporations as are mismanaged, and those who own stock
+and are misled.
+
+"The public conscience of which I speak is the leaven of Christianity at
+work. And we must be content to work with it, to await its fulfilment,
+to realize that no one of us can change the world, but can only do his
+part in making it better. The least we can do is to refuse to indulge
+in practices which jeopardize our own souls, to remain poor if we cannot
+make wealth honestly. Say what you will, the Christian government we
+are approaching will not recognize property, because it is gradually
+becoming clear that the holding of property delays the Kingdom at which
+you scoff, giving the man who owns it a power over the body of the man
+who does not. Property produces slavery, since it compels those who have
+none to work for those who have.
+
+"The possession of property, or of sufficient property to give
+one individual an advantage over his fellows is inconsistent with
+Christianity. Hence it will be done away with, but only when enough have
+been emancipated to carry this into effect. Hence the saying of our
+Lord about the needle's eye--the danger to the soul of him who owns much
+property."
+
+"And how about your Christian view of the world as a vale of tears?"
+Eldon Parr inquired.
+
+"So long as humanity exists, there will always be tears," admitted the
+rector. "But it is a false Christianity which does not bid us work for
+our fellow-men, to relieve their suffering and make the world brighter.
+It is becoming clear that the way to do this effectively is through
+communities, cooperation, through nations, and not individuals. And
+this, if you like, is practical,--so practical that the men like you,
+who have gained unexampled privilege, fear it more and more. The old
+Christian misconception, that the world is essentially a bad place, and
+which has served the ends of your privilege, is going by forever. And
+the motto of the citizens of the future will be the Christian motto, 'I
+am my brother's keeper.' The world is a good place because the Spirit is
+continually working in it, to make it better. And life is good, if only
+we take the right view of it,--the revealed view."
+
+"What you say is all very fine," said Eldon Parr. "And I have heard it
+before, from the discontented, the socialists. But it does not take into
+account the one essential element, human nature."
+
+"On the other hand, your scheme of life fails to reckon with the greater
+factor, divine nature," Hodder replied.
+
+"When you have lived as long as I have, perhaps you will think
+differently, Mr. Hodder." Eldon Parr's voice had abruptly grown
+metallic, as though the full realization had come over him of the
+severity of the clergyman's arraignment; the audacity of the man who
+had ventured to oppose him and momentarily defeated him, who had won
+the allegiance of his own daughter, who had dared condemn him as an
+evil-doer and give advice as to his future course. He, Eldon Parr, who
+had been used to settle the destinies of men! His anger was suddenly at
+white heat; and his voice, which he strove to control, betrayed it.
+
+"Since you have rejected my offer, which was made in kindness, since you
+are bent on ruining my daughter's life as well as your own, and she has
+disregarded my wishes, I refuse to see either of you, no matter to what
+straits you may come, as long as I live. That is understood. And she
+leaves this house to-day, never to enter it again. It is useless to
+prolong this conversation, I think."
+
+"Quite useless, as I feared, Mr. Parr. Do you know why Alison is willing
+to marry me? It is because the strength has been given me to oppose you
+in the name of humanity, and this in spite of the fact that her love for
+you to-day is greater than it has ever been before. It is a part of the
+heavy punishment you have inflicted on yourself that you cannot believe
+in her purity. You insist on thinking that the time will come when
+she will return to you for help. In senseless anger and pride you are
+driving her away from you whom you will some day need. And in that day,
+should God grant you a relenting heart to make the sign, she will come
+to you,--but to give comfort, not to receive it. And even as you have
+threatened me, I will warn you, yet not in anger. Except a man be born
+again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God, nor understand the motives of
+those who would enter into it. Seek and pray for repentance."
+
+Infuriated though he was, before the commanding yet compassionate
+bearing of the rector he remained speechless. And after a moment's
+pause, Hodder turned and left the room....
+
+
+
+III
+
+When Hodder had reached the foot of the stairs, Alison came out to him.
+The mourning she wore made her seem even taller. In the face upturned
+to his, framed in the black veil and paler than he had known it, were
+traces of tears; in the eyes a sad, yet questioning and trustful smile.
+They gazed at each other an instant, before speaking, in the luminous
+ecstasy of perfect communion which shone for them, undimmed, in the
+surrounding gloom of tragedy. And thus, they felt, it would always
+shine. Of that tragedy of the world's sin and sorrow they would ever be
+conscious. Without darkness there could be no light.
+
+"I knew," she said, reading his tidings, "it would be of no use. Tell me
+the worst."
+
+"If you marry me, Alison, your father refuses to see you again. He
+insists that you leave the house."
+
+"Then why did he wish to see you?"
+
+"It was to make an appeal. He thinks, of course, that I have made
+a failure of life, and that if I marry you I shall drag you down to
+poverty and disgrace."
+
+She raised her head, proudly.
+
+"But he knows that it is I who insist upon marrying you! I explained
+it all to him--how I had asked you. Of course he did not understand. He
+thinks, I suppose, that it is simply an infatuation."
+
+In spite of the solemnity of the moment, Hodder smiled down at her,
+touched by the confession.
+
+"That, my dear, doesn't relieve me of responsibility. I am just as
+responsible as though I had spoken first, instead of you."
+
+"But, John, you didn't--?" A sudden fear made her silent.
+
+He took her hand and pressed it reassuringly.
+
+"Give you up? No, Alison," he answered simply. "When you came to me, God
+put you in my keeping."
+
+She clung to him suddenly, in a passion of relief.
+
+"Oh, I never could give you up, I never would unless you yourself told
+me to. Then I would do it,--for you. But you won't ask me, now?"
+
+He put his arm around her shoulders, and the strength of it seemed to
+calm her.
+
+"No, dear. I would make the sacrifice, ask you to make it, if it would
+be of any good. As you say, he does not understand. And you couldn't go
+on living with him and loving me. That solution is impossible. We can
+only hope that the time will come when he will realize his need of you,
+and send for you."
+
+"And did he not ask you anything more?"
+
+Hodder hesitated. He had intended to spare her that.... Her divination
+startled him.
+
+"I know, I know without your telling me. He offered you money, he
+consented to our--marriage if you would give up St. John's. Oh, how
+could he," she cried. "How could he so misjudge and insult you!"
+
+"It is not me he misjudges, Alison, it is mankind, it is God. That is
+his terrible misfortune." Hodder released her tenderly. "You must see
+him--you must tell him that when he needs you, you will come."
+
+"I will see him now, she said. You will wait for, me?"
+
+"Now?" he repeated, taken aback by her resolution, though it was
+characteristic.
+
+"Yes, I will go as I am. I can send for my things. My father has given
+me no choice, no reprieve,--not that I ask one. I have you, dear. I will
+stay with Mr. Bentley to-night, and leave for New York to-morrow, to do
+what I have to do--and then you will be ready for me."
+
+"Yes," he said, "I shall be ready."
+
+He lingered in the well-remembered hall.... And when at last she came
+down again her eyes shone bravely through her tears, her look answered
+the question of his own. There was no need for speech. With not so much
+as a look behind she left, with him, her father's house.
+
+Outside, the mist had become a drizzle, and as they went down the walk
+together beside the driveway she slipped her arm into his, pressing
+close to his side. Her intuition was perfect, the courage of her love
+sublime.
+
+"I have you, dear," she whispered, "never in my life before have I been
+rich."
+
+"Alison!"
+
+It was all he could say, but the intensity of his mingled feeling went
+into the syllables of her name. An impulse made them pause and turn,
+and they stood looking back together at the great house which loomed the
+greater in the thickening darkness, its windows edged with glow. Never,
+as in this moment when the cold rain wet their faces, had the thought of
+its comfort and warmth and luxury struck him so vividly; yes, and of its
+terror and loneliness now, of the tortured spirit in it that found no
+rest.
+
+"Oh, John," she cried, "if we only could!"
+
+He understood her. Such was the perfect quality of their sympathy that
+she had voiced his thought. What were rain and cold, the inclemency of
+the elements to them? What the beauty and the warmth of those great,
+empty rooms to Eldon Parr? Out of the heaven of their happiness they
+looked down, helpless, into the horrors of the luxury of hell.
+
+"It must be," he answered her, "in God's good time."
+
+"Life is terrible!" she said. "Think of what he must have done to
+suffer so, to be condemned to this! And when I went to him, just now, he
+wouldn't even kiss me good-by. Oh, my dear, if I hadn't had you to take
+me, what should I have done?... It never was a home to me--to any of us.
+And as I look back now, all the troubles began when we moved into it.
+I can only think of it as a huge prison, all the more sinister for its
+costliness."
+
+A prison! It had once been his own conceit. He drew her gently away, and
+they walked together along Park Street towards the distant arc-light at
+the corner which flung a gleaming band along the wet pavement.
+
+"Perhaps it was because I was too young to know what trouble was when we
+lived in Ransome Street," she continued. "But I can remember now how
+sad my mother was at times--it almost seemed as though she had a
+premonition." Alison's voice caught....
+
+The car which came roaring through the darkness, and which stopped
+protestingly at their corner, was ablaze with electricity, almost filled
+with passengers. A young man with a bundle changed his place in order
+that they might sit together in one of the little benches bordering
+the aisle; opposite them was a laughing, clay-soiled group of labourers
+going home from work; in front, a young couple with a chubby child. He
+stood between his parents, facing about, gazing in unembarrassed wonder
+at the dark lady with the veil. Alison's smile seemed only to increase
+the solemnity of his adoration, and presently he attempted to climb over
+the barrier between them. Hodder caught him, and the mother turned in
+alarm, recapturing him.
+
+"You mustn't bother the lady, Jimmy," she said, when she had thanked
+the rector. She had dimpled cheeks and sparkling blue eyes, but their
+expression changed as they fell on Alison's face, expressing something
+of the wonder of the child's.
+
+"Oh, he isn't bothering me," Alison protested. "Do let him stand."
+
+"He don't make up to everybody," explained the mother, and the manner of
+her speech was such a frank tribute that Alison flushed. There had been,
+too, in the look the quick sympathy for bereavement of the poor.
+
+"Aren't they nice?" Alison leaned over and whispered to Hodder, when the
+woman had turned back. "One thing, at least, I shall never regret,--that
+I shall have to ride the rest of my life in the streetcars. I love them.
+That is probably my only qualification, dear, for a clergyman's wife."
+
+Hodder laughed. "It strikes me," he said, "as the supreme one."
+
+They came at length to Mr. Bentley's door, flung open in its usual
+wide hospitality by Sam. Whatever theist fortunes, they would always be
+welcome here.... But it turned out, in answer to their question, that
+their friend was not at home.
+
+"No, sah," said Sam, bowing and smiling benignantly, "but he done tole
+me to say, when you and Miss Alison come, hit was to make no diffunce,
+dat you bofe was to have supper heah. And I'se done cooked it--yassah.
+Will you kindly step into the liba'y, suh, and Miss Alison? Dar was a
+lady 'crost de city, Marse Ho'ace said--yassah."
+
+"John," said Alison with a questioning smile, when they were alone
+before the fire, "I believe he went out on purpose,--don't you?--just
+that we might be here alone."
+
+"He knew we were coming?"
+
+"I wrote him."
+
+"I think he might be convicted on the evidence," Hodder agreed. "But--?"
+His question remained unasked.
+
+Alison went up to him. He had watched her, absorbed and fascinated, as
+with her round arms gracefully lifted in front of the old mirror she had
+taken off her hat and veil; smoothing, by a few deft touches, the dark
+crown of her hair. The unwonted intimacy of the moment, invoking as it
+did an endless reflection of other similar moments in their future life
+together, was in its effect overwhelming, bringing with it at last
+a conviction not to be denied. Her colour rose as she faced him, her
+lashes fell.
+
+"Did you seriously think, dear, that we could have deceived Mr. Bentley?
+Then you are not as clever as I thought you. As soon as it happened I
+sent him a note? that very night. For I felt that he ought to be told
+first of all."
+
+"And as usual," Hodder answered, "you were right."
+
+Supper was but a continuation of that delicious sense of intimacy.
+And Sam, beaming in his starched shirt and swallow-tail, had an air of
+presiding over a banquet of state. And for that matter, none had ever
+gone away hungry from this table, either for meat or love. It was,
+indeed, a consecrated meal,--consecrated for being just there. Such was
+the tact which the old darky had acquired from his master that he left
+the dishes on the shining mahogany board, and bowed himself out.
+
+"When you wants me, Miss Alison, des ring de bell."
+
+She was seated upright yet charmingly graceful, behind the old English
+coffee service which had been Mr. Bentley's mother's. And it was she
+who, by her wonderful self-possession, by the reassuring smile she gave
+him as she handed him his cup, endowed it all with reality.
+
+"It's strange," she said, "but it seems as though I had been doing it
+all my life, instead of just beginning."
+
+"And you do it as though you had," he declared.
+
+"Which is a proof," she replied, "of the superior adaptability of
+women."
+
+He did not deny it. He would not then, in truth, have disputed her
+wildest statement... But presently, after they had gone back into the
+library and were seated side by side before the coals, they spoke again
+of serious things, marvelling once more at a happiness which could be
+tinged and yet unmarred by vicarious sorrow. Theirs was the soberer,
+profounder happiness of gratitude and wonder, too wise to exult, but
+which of itself is exalted; the happiness which praises, and passes
+understanding.
+
+"There are many things I want to say to you, John," she told him,
+once, "and they trouble me a little. It is only because I am so utterly
+devoted to you that I wish you to know me as I am. I have always had
+queer views, and although much has happened to change me since I have
+known and loved you, I am not quite sure how much those views have
+changed. Love," she added, "plays such havoc with one's opinions."
+
+She returned his smile, but with knitted brows.
+
+"It's really serious--you needn't laugh. And it's only fair to you to
+let you know the kind of a wife you are getting, before it is too late.
+For instance, I believe in divorce, although I can't imagine it for us.
+One never can, I suppose, in this condition--that's the trouble. I have
+seen so many immoral marriages that I can't think God intends people
+to live degraded. And I'm sick and tired of the argument that an
+indissoluble marriage under all conditions is good for society. That
+a man or woman, the units of society, should violate the divine in
+themselves for the sake of society is absurd. They are merely setting an
+example to their children to do the same thing, which means that society
+in that respect will never get any better. In this love that has come
+to us we have achieved an ideal which I have never thought to reach. Oh,
+John, I'm sure you won't misunderstand me when I say that I would rather
+die than have to lower it."
+
+"No," he answered, "I shall not misunderstand you."
+
+"Even though it is so difficult to put into words what I mean. I don't
+feel that we really need the marriage service, since God has already
+joined us together. And it is not through our own wills, somehow, but
+through his. Divorce would not only be a crime against the spirit, it
+would be an impossibility while we feel as we do. But if love should
+cease, then God himself would have divorced us, punished us by taking
+away a priceless gift of which we were not worthy. He would have shut
+the gates of Eden in our faces because we had sinned against the Spirit.
+It would be quite as true to say 'whom God has put asunder no man may
+join together.' Am I hurting you?"
+
+Her hand was on the arm of his chair, and the act of laying his own on
+it was an assurance stronger than words. Alison sighed.
+
+"Yes, I believed you would understand, even though I expressed myself
+badly,--that you would help me, that you have found a solution. I used
+to regard the marriage service as a compromise, as a lowering of the
+ideal, as something mechanical and rational put in the place of the
+spiritual; that it was making the Church, and therefore God, conform to
+the human notion of what the welfare of society ought to be. And it is
+absurd to promise to love. We have no control over our affections. They
+are in God's hands, to grant or withdraw.
+
+"And yet I am sure--this is new since I have known you--that if such a
+great love as ours be withdrawn it would be an unpardonable wrong for
+either of us to marry again. That is what puzzles me--confounds the
+wisdom I used to have, and which in my littleness and pride I thought
+so sufficient. I didn't believe in God, but now I feel him, through
+you, though I cannot define him. And one of many reasons why I could
+not believe in Christ was because I took it for granted that he taught,
+among other things, a continuation of the marriage relation after love
+had ceased to justify it."
+
+Hodder did not immediately reply. Nor did Alison interrupt his silence,
+but sat with the stillness which at times so marked her personality,
+her eyes trustfully fixed on him. The current pulsing between them was
+unbroken. Hodder's own look, as he gazed into the grate, was that of a
+seer.
+
+"Yes," he said at length, "it is by the spirit and not the letter of our
+Lord's teaching that we are guided. The Spirit which we draw from the
+Gospels. And everything written down there that does not harmonize with
+it is the mistaken interpretation of men. Once the Spirit possesses us
+truly, we are no longer troubled and confused by texts.
+
+"The alpha and omega of Christ's message is rebirth into the knowledge
+of that Spirit, and hence submission to its guidance. And that is what
+Paul meant when he said that it freed us from the law. You are right,
+Alison, when you declare it to be a violation of the Spirit for a man
+and woman to live together when love does not exist. Christ shows us
+that laws were made for those who are not reborn. Laws are the rules of
+society, to be followed by those who have not found the inner guidance,
+who live and die in the flesh. But the path which those who live under
+the control of the Spirit are to take is opened up to them as they
+journey. If all men and women were reborn we should have the paradox,
+which only the reborn can understand, of what is best for the individual
+being best for society, because under the will of the Spirit none can
+transgress upon the rights and happiness of others. The Spirit would
+make the laws and rules superfluous.
+
+"And the great crime of the Church, for which she is paying so heavy
+an expiation, is that her faith wavered, and she forsook the Spirit and
+resumed the law her Master had condemned. She no longer insisted on that
+which Christ proclaimed as imperative, rebirth. She became, as you say,
+a mechanical organization, substituting, as the Jews had done, hard and
+fast rules for inspiration. She abandoned the Communion of Saints, sold
+her birthright for a mess of pottage, for worldly, temporal power when
+she declared that inspiration had ceased with the Apostles, when she
+failed to see that inspiration is personal, and comes through rebirth.
+For the sake of increasing her membership, of dominating the affairs of
+men, she has permitted millions who lived in the law and the flesh, who
+persisted in forcing men to live by the conventions and customs Christ
+repudiated, and so stultify themselves, to act in Christ's name.
+The unpardonable sin against the Spirit is to doubt its workings, to
+maintain that society will be ruined if it be substituted for the
+rules and regulations supposed to make for the material comforts of the
+nations, but which in reality suppress and enslave the weak.
+
+"Nevertheless in spite of the Church, marvellously through the Church
+the germ of our Lord's message has come down to us, and the age in which
+we live is beginning to realize its purport, to condemn the Church for
+her subservient rationalism.
+
+"Let us apply the rule of the Spirit to marriage. If we examine the
+ideal we shall see clearly that the marriage-service is but a symbol.
+Like baptism, it is a worthless and meaningless rite unless the man and
+the woman have been born again into the Spirit, released from the law.
+If they are still, as St. Paul would say, in the flesh, let them have,
+if they wish, a civil permit to live together, for the Spirit can have
+nothing to do with such an union. True to herself, the Church symbolizes
+the union of her members, the reborn. She has nothing to do with laws
+and conventions which are supposedly for the good of society, nor is any
+union accomplished if those whom she supposedly joins are not reborn.
+If they are, the Church can neither make it or dissolve it, but merely
+confirm and acknowledge the work of the Spirit. And every work of the
+Spirit is a sacrament. Not baptism and communion and marriage only, but
+every act of life.
+
+"Oh, John," she exclaimed, her eyes lighting, "I can believe that! How
+beautiful a thought! I see now what is meant when it is said that man
+shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of
+the mouth of God. That is the hourly guidance which is independent of
+the law. And how terrible to think that all the spiritual beauty of
+such a religion should have been hardened into chapter and verse
+and regulation. You have put into language what I think of Mr.
+Bentley,--that has acts are sacraments.... It is so simple when you
+explain it this way. And yet I can see why it was said, too, that we
+must become as children to understand it."
+
+"The difficult thing," replied Holder, gravely, "is to retain it, to
+hold it after we have understood it--even after we have experienced
+it. To continue to live in the Spirit demands all our effort, all our
+courage and patience and faith. We cannot, as you say, promise to love
+for life. But the marriage service, interpreted, means that we will use
+all our human endeavour, with the help of the Spirit, to remain in what
+may be called the reborn state, since it is by the Spirit alone that
+true marriage is sanctified. When the Spirit is withdrawn, man and woman
+are indeed divorced.
+
+"The words 'a sense of duty' belong to moral philosophy and not to
+religion. Love annuls them. I do not mean to decry them, but the reborn
+are lifted far above them by the subversion of the will by which our
+will is submitted to God's. It is so we develop, and become, as it
+were, God. And hence those who are not married in the Spirit are not
+spiritually man and wife. No consecration has taken place, Church or
+no Church. If rebirth occurs later, to either or both, the individual
+conscience--which is the Spirit, must decide whether, as regards each
+other, they are bound or free, and we must stand or fall by that. Men
+object that this is opening the door to individualism. What they fail
+to see is that the door is open, wide, to-day and can never again be
+closed: that the law of the naturally born is losing its power, that
+the worn-out authority of the Church is being set at naught because that
+authority was devised by man to keep in check those who were not reborn.
+The only check to material individualism is spiritual individualism,
+and the reborn man or woman cannot act to the detriment of his
+fellow-creatures."
+
+In her turn she was silent, still gazing at him, her breath coming
+deeply, for she was greatly moved.
+
+"Yes," she said simply, "I can see now why divorce between us would be
+a sacrilege. I felt it, John, but I couldn't reason it out. It is the
+consecration of the Spirit that justifies the union of the flesh. For
+the Spirit, in that sense, does not deny the flesh."
+
+"That would be to deny life," Hodder replied.
+
+"I see. Why was it all so hidden!" The exclamation was not addressed
+to him--she was staring pensively into the fire. But presently, with a
+swift movement, she turned to him.
+
+"You will preach this, John,--all of it!"
+
+It was not a question, but the cry of a new and wider vision of his
+task. Her face was transfigured. And her voice, low and vibrating,
+expressed no doubts. "Oh, I am proud of you! And if they put you out
+and persecute you I shall always be proud, I shall never know why it was
+given me to have this, and to live. Do you remember saying to me once
+that faith comes to us in some human form we love? You are my faith. And
+faith in you is my faith in humanity, and faith in God."
+
+Ere he could speak of his own faith in her, in mankind, by grace of
+which he had been lifted from the abyss, there came a knock at the door.
+And even as they answered it a deeper knowledge filtered into their
+hearts.
+
+Horace Bentley stood before them. And the light from his face, that
+shone down upon them, was their benediction.
+
+
+
+
+AFTERWORD
+
+Although these pages have been published serially, it is with a feeling
+of reluctance that I send them out into the world, for better or worse,
+between the covers of a book. They have been written with reverence,
+and the reading of the proofs has brought back to me vividly the long
+winters in which I pondered over the matter they contain, and wrote and
+rewrote the chapters.
+
+I had not thought to add anything to them by way of an afterword.
+Nothing could be farther from my mind than to pose as a theologian; and,
+were it not for one or two of the letters I have received, I should have
+supposed that no reader could have thought of making the accusation that
+I presumed to speak for any one except myself. In a book of this
+kind, the setting forth of a personal view of religion is not only
+unavoidable, but necessary; since, if I wrote sincerely, Mr. Hodder's
+solution must coincide with my own--so far as I have been able to work
+one out. Such as it is, it represents many years of experience and
+reflection. And I can only crave the leniency of any trained theologian
+who may happen to peruse it.
+
+No one realizes, perhaps, the incompleteness of the religious
+interpretations here presented more keenly than I. More significant,
+more vital elements of the truth are the rewards of a mind which
+searches and craves, especially in these days when the fruit of so many
+able minds lies on the shelves of library and bookshop. Since the last
+chapter was written, many suggestions have come to me which I should
+like to have the time to develop for this volume. But the nature of
+these elements is positive,--I can think of nothing I should care to
+subtract.
+
+Here, then, so far as what may be called religious doctrine is
+concerned, is merely a personal solution. We are in an age when the
+truth is being worked out through many minds, a process which seems
+to me both Christian and Democratic. Yet a gentleman has so far
+misunderstood this that he has already accused me, in a newspaper, of
+committing all the heresies condemned by the Council of Chalcedon,--and
+more!
+
+I have no doubt that he is right. My consolation must be that I have as
+company--in some of my heresies, at least--a goodly array of gentlemen
+who wear the cloth of the orthodox churches whose doctrines he accuses
+me of denying. The published writings of these clergymen are accessible
+to all. The same critic declares that my interpretations are without
+"authority." This depends, of course; on one's view of "authority." But
+his accusation is true equally against many men who--if my observation
+be correct--are doing an incalculable service for religion by giving
+to the world their own personal solutions, interpreting Christianity
+in terms of modern thought. No doubt these, too, are offending the
+champions of the Council of Chalcedon.
+
+And does the gentleman, may I ask, ever read the pages of the Hibbert
+Journal?
+
+Finally, I have to meet a more serious charge, that Mr. Hodder remains
+in the Church because of "the dread of parting with the old, strong
+anchorage, the fear of anathema and criticism, the thought of sorrowing
+and disapproving friends." Or perhaps he infers that it is I who keep
+Mr. Hodder in the Church for these personal reasons. Alas, the concern
+of society is now for those upon whom the Church has lost her hold, who
+are seeking for a solution they can accept. And the danger to-day is not
+from the side of heresy. The rector of St. John's, as a result of his
+struggle, gained what I believe to be a higher and surer faith than that
+which he formerly held, and in addition to this the realization of the
+presence of a condition which was paralyzing the Church's influence.
+
+One thing I had hoped to make clear, that if Mr. Hodder had left the
+Church under these circumstances he would have made the Great Refusal.
+The situation which he faced demanded something of the sublime courage
+of his Master.
+
+Lastly, may I be permitted to add that it is far from my intention to
+reflect upon any particular denomination. The instance which I have
+taken is perhaps a pronounced rather than a particular case of the
+problem to which I have referred, and which is causing the gravest
+concern to thoughtful clergymen and laymen of all denominations.
+
+
+WINSTON CHURCHILL
+
+SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA March 31,1913.
+
+
+
+
+
+     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+     Absurd to promise to love
+     Acceptance of authority is not faith, it is mere credulity
+     Always getting glimpses of things when it is too late
+     Antipathy to forms
+     Bad music, she said, offended her
+     Can't believe in the doctrine of the virgin birth
+     Clothes of one man are binding on another
+     Conviction that all things were as they ought to be
+     Deification of beauty to the exclusion of all else
+     Economic slavery
+     Elaborate attention little men are apt to bestow upon women
+     Even after all these ages, the belief, the hope would not down
+     Faith may be likened to an egg
+     Foolish sacrifices are worse than useless
+     For ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter
+     Futility of the traditional words of comfort
+     Genius, analyzed, is often disappointing
+     God himself would have divorced us
+     Had a habit of not waiting for answers to her questions
+     Happiness of gratitude and wonder, too wise to exult
+     He was what is known as a "success"--always that magic word
+     Hell's here--isn't it?
+     How to be silent with a clamouring heart
+     I see no one upon whom I can rely but myself
+     I hate humility
+     I'm always searching for things to do
+     If Christians were logical, they should be Socialists
+     Immortality as orthodox Christianity depicts it
+     Impulse had brought him thus far
+     Indiscriminate, unreasoning self-sacrifice
+     Individualism with which the Church can have no sympathy
+     Intellectually lazy
+     Know a great deal and don't believe anything
+     Knowledge puts faith out of the question
+     Logical result of independent thinking is anarchy
+     "Love," she added, "plays such havoc with one's opinions"
+     Luxuries formerly unthought of seemed to become necessities
+     Material proof, it seems to me, is a denial of faith
+     Mistaking the effect for the cause
+     Mixture of awkwardness and straightforwardness
+     Not given to trite acquiescence
+     Olmah which Isaiah uses does not mean virgin
+     Only one regret as to what you said--that it is true
+     Pleasure? Yes. It makes me feel as if I were of some use
+     Religion, I think, should be everybody's (profession)
+     Rule which you so confidently apply to fit all cases
+     Scandalously forced through the council of Nicaea
+     Seeking a forgiveness out of all proportion to the trespass
+     St Paul, you say, put us in our proper place
+     Success--which was really failure
+     Sunday was then a day essentially different from other days
+     The law cannot fit all cases
+     The weak always sink
+     The hours of greatest suffering are the empty hours
+     Thinking isn't--believing
+     Vagueness generally attributed to her sex
+     Vividly unreal, as a toy village comes painted from the shop
+     We must believe, if we believe at all, without authority
+     We are always trying to get away from ourselves
+     We never can foresee how we may change
+     We have no control over our affections
+     When our brief span of usefulness is done
+     Who had learned the lesson of mothers,--how to wait
+     Whole conception of charity is a crime against civilization
+     You and your religion are as far apart as the poles
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Inside of the Cup, Complete
+by Winston Churchill
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