"Yes."
"Then why--"
Whittenden interrupted him.
"What do you believe, Brenton? For any man is bound to have some shreds
of belief; that is, as long as he keeps out of the nearest asylum for
the incurable insane."
"My belief, or my profession?"
"Hang your profession!" Whittenden said impatiently. "Or else, hang on
to it, and keep still. But it's your belief I want, your creed, your
working platform."
"How do you know I have one?" Brenton asked rather irritably, for
Whittenden's attitude was distinctly less satisfying to him than it had
been of yore.
"Because I know the kind of men Saint Peter's has been accustomed to
demand. Also because I have talked to Reed Opdyke."
"And Opdyke told you--"
"Nothing; beyond the mere fact that he is very fond of you. Opdyke
doesn't care for many people; his very affection tells its story.
Still, that is beside the point. What tag ends of belief have you got
left?"
Even in its kindliness, the voice was masterful, the voice of the
thoroughbred, when he gets in earnest. Brenton longed to stiffen
himself against the mastery, but he could not. His ineffectual effort
lent an edge of sarcasm to his tone.
"When the eye of the parish is upon me, I read out the Nicene Creed in
the deepest voice at my disposal. When--"
"This is rather beneath your customary methods, Brenton," his companion
interrupted him. "But go on."
Brenton's lips shut hard together for a minute. Then he did go on, and
in a totally different voice.
"When I look myself squarely in the face, Whittenden, I find I can
assent to just two points, no more."
"And they?"
"God. Universal law."
"So far, so good. And man?" Whittenden queried.
"Their corollary."
"Exactly." Whittenden walked on in silence for a little way. "Well,
what else do you want, Brenton?" he inquired.
"Nothing. My people, however, want a great deal more."
"How do you know?"
"Our ritual."
"Can't you interpret it with any common sense?" The impatience again
was manifest.
"Not in common honesty." And Brenton lifted up his chin.
A little laugh came to his companion's lips and eyes.
"Why not?" he queried. "You don't expect our public schools to abandon
the Aeneid and Homer, because they don't consider the old mythologies
accurate history. You don't expect to give up the best of Hafiz and
Omar, because you also come in contact with the worst of them. We'd be
poorer, all our lives, by just so much. In the same way, why can't you
take the best of our theologies as fact and love it, and, at the same
time, keep a certain respect for the rest of them that you don't
believe, the sort of respect you give an aged ancestor, a respect for
what they have been to the world at large, not for what they are now to
you? Belief, in the last analysis, is nothing but well-applied common
sense."
It was a long time before either of the men spoke again. In the end,
Whittenden broke the silence.
"Brenton, I'd have given a good deal to have known your parents," he
said.
"To weigh me up?" Brenton smiled. "You saw my mother: a strong,
self-reliant, self-willed character, threaded through and through with
Calvinism. She was totally unselfish, yet totally self-centred. In the
same way, she was always on a battleground between the claims of her
own rampant freewill and her sanctified belief in predestination. It's
not an easy thing to analyze her."
"And your father?"
Brenton coloured hotly.
"I was only ten days old, when he died, Whittenden; but the tradition
has come down to me. If he hadn't been so weak, so totally
self-indulgent, he'd have been a genius. Even in the worst of his
self-indulgence, he had ten times my mother's logic. If he had had one
tenth of her will power, he'd have counted. As it was, though,--utter
annihilation. He died, and left no record. My mother helped it on, by
never mentioning him, up to the very day she died."
"Hm!" Whittenden said thoughtfully. "Perhaps she knows him better now."
Brenton glanced at him curiously.
"You still believe it?"
"Of course. No; no use arguing from the point of view of the biologist
and chemist, Brenton. It won't do you any good, nor me any harm. It's
in me; I don't know whence or wherefore, so save your breath and use it
on other things. I think your ancestry is all accounted for. As to
environment: what does your wife say about it?"
"The environment?" Brenton asked, a little bit perversely.
"No; the highly individualistic platform you are erecting for yourself?
Are you to leave room there for her?"
"Hardly. She wouldn't mount it, if I did."
"Doesn't share the doubts?"
Brenton shook his head. As yet, he was loath to put into words the fact
of his wife's adoption of her new creed. Appearances and his own
forebodings to the contrary, it might be but a passing phase of her
experience. The label of it, though, once affixed, would be well-nigh
impossible of removal.
"Katharine has never come so very much inside my professional life," he
paltered.
Whittenden pricked up his ears, partly at the statement, partly at the
unfamiliar name. He had felt sure that he had heard "I, Scott, take
thee, Catia." In his more mellow New York life, such transforming
evolution was less common. However, names were a detail. It was the
fact he challenged.
"Your wife? But how can she stay outside it, Brenton?"
"Oh, she's not outside it, in a sense. Before the boy came, she was in
all the guilds and parish teas and that. Really," Brenton spoke with a
blind optimism; "she was very popular. But, in the vital things one
thinks and feels--Whittenden, I don't imagine any woman ever really can
share those things with us men. We are created different. We can't go
inside each other's shells."
And in that final utterance, it seemed to Whittenden, Scott Brenton
voiced the saddest phase of all his present unbelief.