Saint Peter's Parish was unique in all New England. The trails of old
and new in its experience crossed and crisscrossed at every point,
causing a long succession of eccentricities which endeared themselves
to the minds of the oldest inhabitants. However, even the oldest
inhabitants breathed a deep sigh of relief, when finally they were
housed in the brand-new church up beside the college campus, a real
stone church, with transepts and painted windows and choir-stalls
within, and a cloister and a grand tall tower without. The ramshackle
old wooden church had been dear to them, had even remained dear to them
after the railroad had laid down its tracks under their very eaves; but
they were fretted by the crudely caustic comments of strangers coming
to the town, and they were still more fretted when the puffing,
screeching Sunday trains drowned the voice of the good old rector whose
mannerly traditions forbade his puffing and screeching in his turn.
He had been a dear old rector, rotund and pompous; and his surplice had
been fully as long and voluminous as a Mother Hubbard nightie. Possibly
it was on that account, to equalize the demand for muslin, that, in
those same old days, the choir had worn no surplices at all, but had
been accustomed to come tramping into church in all the bravery of sack
coats and violent haberdashery. Indeed, upon the part of certain of the
congregation, there had been a tendency to regard it as a finger-post
to Rome, when some younger member of the vestry suggested putting the
ban on scarlet neckties. Saint Peter's Parish was set like a holy
beacon in the very midst of a valley which was tainted with heresies
Arian and unspeakable, tainted so thoroughly that the ritualistic
development of Saint Peter's was delayed for decades upon that account.
Later, Saint Peter's became far wiser in its generation. Its policy had
been to extend a cordial welcome to all men of whatever creed, and its
early fathers had felt that it was surer to attract the more unstable
of its neighbours, if it held its threshold at the common level of them
all. In course of time, however, wisdom dawned and broadened to a
perfect day of psychological common sense. A theological reaction, of
whatever sort, was bound in the last analysis to be a matter of a
sudden leap, not of a deliberate slide. One either took a veritable
ski-jump into the next church but three, or else one merely stayed
where one was, and fretted about the details of the service.
It was now a good twenty years and more since Saint Peter's had
abandoned its old barracks of a church and moved up town into its new
quarters. As a matter of course, it had settled down as close as
possible to the campus. A student congregation might be a bit unstable,
taken as a parish; but it was distinctly lucrative, when it came to the
point of counting up the offertory. Furthermore, as result of its
Sunday-morning habits of arising, it was prone to turn in at the first
church door that offered.
Nowadays on Sunday mornings, Saint Peter's rector had no monopoly of
surplices. The choir, discreetly garbed and outwardly reverential,
warbled early English settings to the hymns, the while they came
striding slowly up the aisle in a species of churchly goose-step that
demanded a pause on each foot, to prevent the physical march outrunning
the musical one. Nowadays, too, there was daily celebration; that is,
when any one was sufficiently energetic to get up and get into church
in time. What happened upon those other days, when the rector was
abandoned to the rows of empty pews, was still a matter of profane
conjecture. Discussed in whispers, it was agreed to be a subject best
left to the disclosing hand of time.
Into this elaborate and decorative harness, Scott Brenton was now
breaking his young strength, his young ambition. In his old parish in
the hills, it had been a question of preaching the best sermons that he
could and looking out for his people in the intervals, rather than of
forms and ceremonies and intonations of the Nicene Creed. In accepting
the Bishop's intimation that Saint Peter's Parish would extend to him a
welcoming hand, he had thought singularly little about the outward
trappings of his priesthood. Catia knew it all; but she held her peace.
The Bishop also had held his peace, and a little bit for the same
reason that Catia had done. He knew the theological history of Scott
Brenton; he knew that, like all half-broken colts, he easily might shy
at first sight of the harness; yet, once with the harness on and fitted
to his back, he would fall to work in earnest and pull steadily with
the best of them. And it was the pulling that the Bishop wished, not
the mere jingling of the farthingale. Under the last incumbent, Saint
Peter's had been running down a little. It was not in all respects an
easy parish; and Brenton, young, earnest and as magnetic as he was
self-distrustful, was the very man to build it up. Nevertheless, the
Bishop saw to it that Scott Brenton should never attend a service at
Saint Peter's, until his acceptance of the parish was settled past all
gainsaying.
From the first morning of his reading service at Saint Peter's, Brenton
had been aware that he was opening a fresh chapter of his life. In the
old hillside parish, there had been things to do and souls to save.
Here, it seemed to him that all the souls had been saved prenatally. As
for the things to do, these people were too critical, too self-reliant
to take kindly to the intimate sort of ministrations in which, of old,
he had delighted. For the future, it would be the quality of his
sermons that counted most, rather than his personal contact with his
people.
The congregation seemed to him conglomerate, a jumble of conflicting
elements. There were the old, old residents and their offspring, people
who squabbled violently among themselves as to whose ancestor came
aboard the _Mayflower_ first, and which in what capacity. There were
the mediæval spinsters who always reach their best development in the
semi-small New England town, spinsters who have clubs and theories, and
yet play golf, and frivol delightfully above their luncheon tables. And
there were college girls in hordes, alert young things, critical alike
of evil and of good, of the hang of the back of a surplice where the
shoulders stoop a little, and of the turning of the final phrases that
naturally lead up to the _And now_--To Scott Brenton, looking down
upon the students in the congregation, his first Sunday morning at
Saint Peter's, their befeathered hats and their intent young faces
seemed to him the masking labels upon a store of frozen dynamite.
Thawed, it might serve for any amount of useful tunneling; it might go
off explosively in the open, at almost any given instant.
Taken all in all, it was upon the student fraction of his congregation
that Brenton looked with greatest interest; it was to them, in greatest
measure, that the best of his sermons preached themselves. The phrase
is no slipshod inversion of the fact. The best of all sermons do preach
themselves, both in their original inception and their ultimate
delivery. All the so-called preacher does about it is to give the
intermediate polishing to his projectile, and then to hold himself
still, while it is going off, and watch what happens, by way of
preparation for aiming his next shot.
As a matter of course, with a target so unstable as a student audience,
Brenton by no means hit the bull's-eye every time. That he did hit it
occasionally, however, argues no mean ability, no paltry knowledge of
youthful human nature. Over their Sunday dinners, the girls discussed
his sermons with increasing vigour. The echoes of these discussions,
coming to Brenton's ears, set him to preaching with increasing
conscientiousness. However, there still was salvation for him; it was
his sermons that he took so much in earnest, and not himself, the
preacher.
But, although it was upon his student hearers that Scott Brenton tossed
down, broadcast and unsaving, the best of all he had within himself, it
was among the permanent residents of Saint Peter's that his real work
was supposed to be done. He did that work most faithfully; he showed
himself both tireless and tactful in his arrangement of the parish
mechanism, in his gathering up and straightening and knotting here and
there the threads his predecessor had flung down in a tangled heap.
Nevertheless, his heart was in the other end of his work, not for any
individual interest in the different girls; but because his whole
instinct told him that here was the dynamic force of the whole
organization, that the rest of it was curiously static. Under those
befeathered hats were eager brains which weighed their theology and
measured it, not took it ready made. It was for him to serve it out to
them in such a guise that, weighed, they should not find it wanting.
Catia, on the other hand, looked upon the student end of her husband's
parish with disapproving eyes. The girls annoyed her by their cocksure
alertness, their little air of being primed, ready for any emergency
that chanced to offer. They vexed her by their manifest absorption in
her husband; they vexed her yet more by their inexplicable lack of
interest in herself.
Upon the older and more stable fraction of the parish, however, Catia
lavished an interested affection which would have seemed well-nigh
maternal, had it not been for the care she took to emphasize the gulf
in age which yawned between herself and certain of the individuals who
made up its list. She studied the list with no slight degree of care.
By the end of their first month in the new parish, she knew to a nicety
how the line of local social precedence ordered itself, where, at any
point in the procession, town must yield to gown, or the reverse. She
knew the lineage and history of all the wardens and their wives, and
then of all the vestry-men; she even cultivated a nodding acquaintance
with their family skeletons, and learned to recognize the seals upon
the doors that, as a rule, hid them from public view. She knew the
hobbies of the average prosperous member at large of the flock
ecclesiastical, and made a series of elaborate calculations regarding
the intersecting social orbits of those same members. As for the other,
lesser members of the congregation, she had an especial kind of smile,
half of sweetness, half of deprecation, that she bestowed upon each one
of them in turn; but she never made the slightest effort to separate
them, one from another, in her mind, or to return any of their calls.
To Catia's astute brain, the duty of a rector's lady consisted in
helping her husband up, not on.
It was at about this epoch, too, that Catia ceased to be Catia and
became Kathryn. In some respects, the most remarkable thing about the
change was the suddenness with which it was announced to Scott.
A dozen of them had been dining at the Keltridges', one night, six
months or so after Brenton had come to take charge of the congregation
of Saint Peter's. It was essentially a church-warden kind of dinner,
with all the other wardens and their wives to meet the rector and his
lady, the kind of dinner that one gives and goes to, out of stern
necessity, when, all the time, one longs for something just a little
less made up by rule of thumb. The one exception to the prevailing
ecclesiastical flavour, that night, was in the person of a local
novelist who, albeit suave and very bald, wrote novels of the raucous,
woolly West. Moreover, like all other novelists, he rejoiced in talking
shop. Accordingly, with the utmost expedition, he dragged the talk
around to the law regarding the choice of names.
"Of course," he expounded, for the benefit of whom it might concern;
"the first thing I always do, when I go to work, is to name my
characters. It's the hardest thing in the world to do--properly. You
can stick any sort of name to any sort of character, I know; but that's
not naming them. Not at all. The name must be a label; it must fit like
a glove, and yet the character must be fitted to it. And most of the
names I find are so trite."
"Likewise the characters," Dolph Dennison assured him, _sotto voce_.
Dolph, by way of his older brother, who was vestryman, might be termed
sub-ecclesiastical. However, in any case, he would have been sure of a
seat at the Keltridge dinner, even if all the other guests had been
archbishops. It needs at least one such irresponsible youngster to act
as appetizer for the solid things before him.
Only Olive heard his comment. As a matter of course, Dolph's place was
next to Olive. Long since, discerning hostesses had discovered that
therein lay the only path to peace. Otherwise, Dolph either sulked
palpably; or else ignored his other neighbour and shouted all his talk
across the table into Olive's ears. Not that either Dolph or Olive had
any notion of being at all in love with each other. It was merely that
things struck them the same way at the same instant, and that Dolph,
being young and a good deal spoiled, could see no reason against a
prompt exchange of comments on the fact. Therefore, for the peace of
the other people at the table, it had become a universal local law
that, no matter who took Olive Keltridge out, Dolph Dennison should be
placed at her other side.
Olive, then, heard Dolph's comment and, what was infinitely worse, she
feared the novelist had heard it, too. Therefore, to save the feelings
of the bald little man, she flung herself into the talk.
"I see exactly what you mean," she told him. "Your idea is that, when
you have conceived a character that is wholly original--"
"Ahem!" Dolph strangled suddenly.
But Olive continued, without pause for flinching, for now the bald
little novelist was facing her intently, and it was plain, from the
tentative waggling of his beard, that he would mount his hobby and be
off again, if she gave him so much as a comma's breadth by which to
creep back into the talk.
"Wholly original," she repeated sternly; "that it must be very trying
to be obliged to descend to the every day of things, and name her
Mamie."
There came a peal of laughter at the accent with which Olive had
contrived to endow the name. The peal was cut short, however, by the
fussy accent of the little novelist.
"You have hit the nail on the head, Miss Olive, distinctly on the
head," he assured her, with a bow and smile so suave as to be devoid of
meaning. "Really," and Olive felt as if she were a young child and he
were offering her a stick of candy; "it was a very smart little tap.
Yes, as you say, a Mamie is an anticlimax to one's best endeavours.
Now, if all the ladies," Olive had a momentary longing to hurl a plate
in his unctuous direction; "only were blessed with names like yours, we
poor novelists would never be devoid of sources for our inspiration."
"Encore!" remarked Dolph Dennison, with admirable gravity.
Once again Olive sought to save the situation, as well as to remove the
subject of the talk from resting solely on herself.
"If that is all you want," she answered lightly; "you surely will find
Mrs. Brenton's name offering you all sorts of inspiration, much better
than anything mine could give."
"Mrs. Brenton?" The little novelist was palpably uncertain as to whom
the name belonged. He was not only Unitarian by theology, but
inattentive by profession; and, moreover, he had but just returned from
a copy-hunting trip in the direction of his raucous West.
"Yes." Olive made signals of distress in the direction of the rector's
wife who was bending above her salad, with every appearance of anxious
absorption in her tour of discovery among its elements. Her colour
betrayed her, though, and Olive judged it would be the part of wisdom
to drag her by the heels into the talk. "Mrs. Brenton, I am just
telling Mr. Prather what a benefactor you ought to be considered,
according to his notion about names. Surely, yours is unusual enough to
win his full approval."
Even as she spoke, Olive realized the vapidness of her words and was
ashamed of them. An instant later, though, her shame exchanged itself
for astonishment.
The rector's lady raised her brows, and spoke with studied
carelessness.
"Really, Miss Keltridge," she said calmly; "there is nothing so very
unusual in the name of Kathryn."
"Kathryn!" Olive fairly stuttered over her reply, for she saw Scott
Brenton's eyes turn to his wife, and she read amazement in them,
amazement and something else that was dangerously akin to contempt. "I
thought your name was Catia, Mrs. Brenton."
But Kathryn Brenton laid down her fork, as though the salad had ceased
to interest her. Then she spoke, and her accent conveyed the same
impression as concerned the conversation.
"Oh, no; Catia is just a little nickname. That is all. My name is
really Kathryn."
And then, for an instant and to her lasting shame, Olive Keltridge's
glance sought that of Brenton. Before the hurt and abased look in his
deep gray eyes, her own eyes dropped, ashamed and pitiful. What right
had she, in a moment so tragic, albeit so very, very petty, to spy upon
him in his disappointment? What right to obtrude her honest sympathy
upon his secret pain?
She dropped her eyes, then, promptly. None the less, Scott Brenton
realized that, alone of all the group about the table, Olive Keltridge
had recognized both elements: the secret, and the pain.