"Not guilty!" he protested.
"Yes, you are. I wormed it out of Brenton, in the end, in spite of his
growling. It's too bad of me to tell you; and yet it seems only fair
that you should get at the truth of the situation. Besides--You know
you are a fearful egoist, Reed; we all are, for that matter. Besides,
it may make you a little bit more tolerant of Brenton, may lead you to
smooth him down where I have been rubbing him the wrong way. In fact,
you owe it to him, to atone for the volcanic effect you have had on his
theology."
"Dear man, I haven't upset his blamed theology," Reed objected. "I'm
sound enough; I wouldn't upset a mouse. Ask Ramsdell if I've ever
argued against his belief in the literal greening apple, 'a wee bit
hunripe, sir,' upon which Adam feasted."
"Not in words. It's the fact of you that's so upsetting."
"I've been accused unjustly of a good many things in my time,
Whittenden. Besides," again there came the grimace at the couch; "it
rather seems to me that I'm the one who has been upset."
"That's the whole row. You are the first brick in the line. You bowled
over Brenton; now he appears to be bowling over his wife. Yes, I mean
it. If Brenton had held steady, she never would have wobbled, much less
bolted off to Christian Science. She was keen enough to feel him
tottering, and she evidently made up her mind to save herself from the
impending ruins by taking refuge upon the other side of the street. I
must say it was rather prudent of her. She had the sense to choose a
new house built on a totally different stratum from her old one. If one
collapsed, it couldn't well jar the other."
"Hold on, Whittenden!" Reed broke in, after long waiting for a pause.
"I am willing to take my share of blame for most things; but I'll be--"
"Sh-h!" Whittenden warned him indolently. "Remember I'm a rector in
good standing."
"Then bring me a book of synonyms. Anyhow, I'll be it, before I'll take
the responsibility of that Brenton woman's vagaries. Ask Olive."
"I don't need to," Whittenden remarked at his cigar. "I married them.
Likewise, I have seen Brenton, this very day. After collating those two
references, I don't need Miss Keltridge for a commentary. As for
Brenton--"
Opdyke interrupted.
"How do you figure out that I've been upsetting him?" he queried.
Whittenden settled himself in his favourite position, low in his chair
and with one hand flung upward to grasp the chair-top above his head.
His eyes, fixed on Opdyke, were full of merriment.
"Let's go back a little. When you first knew Brenton, he was a bit
uncommon, the ordinary product of Calvinism flavoured with something
vastly more hectic. That was inside him, that hectic splash in his
blood; it made him imaginative, greedy of new ideas, greedy to prove
that they were good. Moreover, he had been trained to believe that an
irate Deity of unstable nerves presided over the universe; that He had
created the world and beast and man in a series of experiments which
had come off well, until it reached the last one, man; that man had
gone bad in the making, and must be pursued and thrashed for all
eternity on that account, unless he made an umbrella out of his
acknowledged vices, and sat down underneath it and sang hymns to a harp
accompaniment. Else, he was grilled eternally. But the gist of the
whole matter was that man had gone bad in the making, and that his
Maker was angry at him to the end of time. And that same blundering and
angry Maker was the God one had to love and honour. Naturally, being
constituted as he is, Brenton, once he had cut his wisdom teeth, turned
balky, refused to see why he should love a God who behaved like a
bad-tempered child that spites the toy he has broken and beats the wall
where he has bumped his head. Meanwhile--"
"Do I--" Opdyke was beginning.
Whittenden waved aside the interruption.
"No; you don't come in yet. Be patient. As I was going to say,
meanwhile he went into his first laboratory and made the prompt
discovery that nothing ever happens, that causes are set in motion ages
and ages before they ever materialize into effects. That set him to
thinking, set him to wondering why the thing that he was trained to
call revealed religion should be the only lawless thing in all the
universe. Why the same Deity should have created law, and then set
Himself up in opposition to it, should have started the wheels to
running, and then, every now and then, stuck a mighty finger in, to pry
them apart and make them slip a cog, in deference to some later
modification of His original plan. It was just about then that I found
him. He was floundering in a perfect mire, composed of the dust of
conflict mingled with penitential tears. Really, he was knee-deep in
the muck; and I put in a good share of my vacation in trying to haul
him back to solid ground."
Opdyke nodded.
"He has told me."
"His side, only. Mine was a degree less serious, Reed. Sorry for him as
I was, I couldn't help a certain amusement at seeing him get himself
into such a mess over nothing. How any person with a fair share of
common sense can--Well, I toiled over him, all summer. Talk about
mines! I mined in him. I sank new shafts and I dug out new veins, and I
presented samples of ore for his inspection. By the end of the summer,
I'd got him to where he admitted that a law-abiding God was an
improvement on his old, erratic, lawless, irate Deity; that it was
treating Him with a long way more respect to endow Him with the
attributes of a high-minded gentleman than to consider Him a mere
purveyor of red-hot discipline for sins He had specifically created.
Then, in the end, I put it squarely up to him: if he must preach at
all, why not choose a church that stood for law and order in the
universe, a church that, hanging to the old traditions, yet held out
her arms to the new interpretations of the law and gospel, instead of
sticking to the cast-iron, white-hot Calvinism which hadn't marched an
inch, hadn't so much as changed the focus of its spectacles, since the
pre-Darwin days of the very first of his ancestral parsons."
"Well?"
"Well." And Whittenden pulled himself up short. "This is where you
begin to come in on the scene, you reprobate. I had just got him on his
legs, marching sanely along, to the tune of 'All Thy works shall praise
Thy name,' when the doctors came lugging you home into his very parish,
laid you down underneath his very nose. No wonder you upset him,
completely bowled him over off his theological pins. His God was just
and loving and logical, even if a little bit more given to personal
interference than any but a Calvinistic God is supposed to be. And here
were you, from all accounts a law-abiding citizen--of course the
theologian in him failed to take the black powder into account--smitten
down in your prime by what he was electing to call the hand of Divine
Providence. Of course, it tousled up all the notions I had been
stroking down so carefully. He came on a knot--from his own story, I
think it was the question as to why a purely innocent Opdyke was chosen
as an object of wrathful vengeance. Then he immediately went panicky.
That's the erratic strain in him. Up to a certain point, he's logical;
then he gets into a seething mass of mismatched syllogisms. In this
case, if Providence was good, and you also were good, then Providence
wouldn't have knocked you into a cocked hat. No matter now about the
sympathy of my phrase; I want you to get the gist of the whole
situation. Well, he turned and twisted that around into form _AAA_,
_EAE_, and so on down the line; and, worse luck, he twisted himself
with it till he lost all his point of view, got dizzy, and missed his
footing utterly. The original trouble lay in his sheer inability to
tally up you and a benign Providence into any proper sort of a sum.
Therefore, one of you must be improper and, hence, must be abolished.
Therefore, as you were very weighty and manifestly refused to budge, he
proceeded to abolish Providence."
"Hm. Well." Opdyke spoke thoughtfully. "I begin to see. However, even
if I am to blame, I still insist upon it I'm not guilty. Meanwhile,
what now?"
"Meanwhile, he's become so enamoured of the abolishing process that
he's keeping on. Unless we can contrive to break up the habit, in the
end he will analyze himself into his original elements, and then
abolish those."