"The thing is amounting to an obsession," Doctor Keltridge told
Professor Opdyke testily, two months later. "I never saw a case of such
ineradicable dubiousness concerning all the things that do not count."
"But the fellow is sincere," the professor urged in extenuation.
"Yes; that makes it all so much the worse, as we doctors are aware.
It's a species of disease, Opdyke, and when a patient takes his disease
seriously, as a general rule it's all up with him. Just how far has
Brenton gone?"
"From our standpoint, not very far; from the standpoint of the student
mind, to the outer limits of agnosticism."
The doctor whistled thoughtfully.
"What a damn-fool he is, Opdyke!" he remarked, with stress upon the
hyphen.
"Yes, and no. If I were going to analyze him, I'd write his formula as
B{_3}M+ECo{_7}, thrice brilliant man plus--and, mind you, the plus is a
serious handicap--an embodied conscience raised to the seventh power.
Brenton is brilliant; but his mind works in a series of swift flashes,
and the flashes dazzle him till they spoil all of his perspective.
Instead of taking them for what they are, mere sparks flying from the
ends of broken mental contact, he thinks that they are errant gleams of
universal truth, vouchsafed to him alone. Then his seven-horse-power
conscience goes to work, and bids him scatter the gleams across a
darkening world. If he didn't mean so very well, he would do infinitely
better. However, he--"
"Is Brenton," the doctor interposed quietly. "What is more, he will be
Brenton till the end of time. He even may get worse, by way of natural
reaction from the strain he was under with his wife. He steadied to
that better than I hoped, steadied to the baby's death, and steadied to
the reproaches she considerately heaped on him for her parting gift."
"Reproaches?"
"Yes. She told him that he was to blame for the whole situation; that,
if he hadn't run amok, she would be jogging contentedly along the path
of ancestral Calvinism. Moreover, the fact that there is more than a
grain of truth in her contention doesn't lessen the sting that it has
left behind. Now, as a natural consequence, the strain over, he is
letting go entirely. He is made like that. Unless we want him to go to
pieces utterly, we shall either have to invoke the aid of circumstance,
or else bring him up with a round turn, ourselves."
"How?" the professor queried flatly. "A man in his position is not
amenable to discipline."
"I'm not so sure of that." The doctor chuckled. "I am a trustee, you
know."
"Then he'll resign."
"Not a bit of it. He may threaten it, may talk grand and elevated
nonsense concerning freedom of speech and all the rest of it. When it
comes to resignation, though, he will draw in his horns. His life is in
that laboratory of yours."
"And in his students?"
"No. There's the trouble. It's the idea itself he's after, not its
growing grip upon the world at large."
"Then what makes him----" The professor paused for the fitting word.
The doctor supplied it, and remorselessly.
"Explatterate? Because it's a part of him to talk forth his imaginings,
and, just at the present hour, he lacks all proper outlet but his
class. Something has gone bad inside the man; no wonder, though, when
one thinks of all that he has gone through. Even you, Opdyke, will
never know the worst of that. Still, we shall have to put some sort of
brake upon him; he can't go on like this."
For a little while, the professor smoked in silence.
"Can't you warn him unofficially, Keltridge?" he asked then.
"That he is disgracing the department?"
"No. That he is wrecking his final chance to amount to anything that's
practical? That, if he holds on here, he must keep within some sort of
limits in the things he says? That, if he lets go this present
opportunity, he'll turn into the worst of all things, a mental
derelict?"
The doctor groaned at the suggestion.
"Opdyke, I'll be hanged if I'll put in all my time, playing
intellectual wet-nurse to Scott Brenton! I've served my turn. If ever
he began to cut his wisdom teeth, it's time he was about it."
The professor took up the metaphor and cast it back upon the doctor.
"A good many babies die of teething," he said. "I've heard you say,
yourself, that it was the one time in all a man's life when he was most
dependent on the ministrations of the doctor."
The doctor rose and straightened up his shoulders.
"Fairly caught," he confessed. "Well, I'll do my best. Meanwhile, how
is Reed?"
"Too busy to think much about himself."
"Not overworking?" the doctor questioned sharply.
"No. At least, not if his mental condition is any index to his
physical. He is eager as a boy over the way his work is coming in. Did
I tell you he has an assistant coming, day after to-morrow? Poor little
Dennison has been swamped, for two weeks, in the rising tide of things
that he knew nothing at all about. I must say he's been heroic in his
efforts to help Reed out."
The doctor nodded.
"Dolph is a good sort. In the last analysis, he is not unlike Reed;
they have the same staying power, the same trick of hating to take
themselves in earnest. Still, for Reed's sake as well as Dolph's, I'm
glad a trained assistant is coming. In fact, I might say I am glad on
my own account."
"You?"
The doctor laughed.
"Yes. I've had Dolph at all hours, tearing his hair in my laboratory,
while I tried to coach him. I do think, for a boy brought up on
belles-lettres, he's made a decent showing as assistant mineralogist. I
like Dolph. He's an all-round good fellow."
The professor laid aside his pipe; then he looked up keenly.
"He's at your house often?" he inquired.
The doctor read his old friend like a large-print page. Reading, he
straightway became impenetrable.
"Yes. He drops in rather often," he assented. "Of course, he knows I am
a good deal interested in Reed's new venture. Wonderful, isn't it, the
way it has turned out so well? If only Brenton had one quarter of his
steady grip!"
But, for the present, steady grip was the one thing Brenton lacked.
Indeed, watching the recent chaos of his domestic life, one could
scarcely wonder. As the doctor had said, reaction was bound to come. It
had been no small upsetting, too, the saying farewell to his
association with Saint Peter's Parish. The sudden reversal of his
collar buttons was, in a sense, typical of the sudden reversal of all
his habits of thought and life. His grip had been loosening, during
many previous months; the sudden change in his responsibilities
appeared to have relaxed it utterly.
In the broadest sense, Brenton's old work, like his new, had been
teaching. Now, however, the enthusiasm of his gospel was possessing him
completely, a gospel, nowadays, solely of the science which, heretofore,
threading through and through the fabric of his sermons, had of
necessity been juggled to the likeness of the Book of Revelation. Now
that he could set it forth in all its nakedness, it seemed to Brenton
more than ever like the Book of Revelation. Day after day, his
enthusiasm for his theme increased its pace, threw off the bridle of
hard, concrete fact, ran to the speculative limits of its course, and
then ran past them. By the first of May, Brenton's lectures had made
themselves one of the features of the college world; but, by the same
token, they had ceased to be lectures upon chemistry, and had become
harangues upon every phase of the allied sciences, harangues which ran
through the entire gamut of abstract investigation, and came to rest at
last upon the pair of finite questions: _Whence?_ and _Whither?_
And, by the first of May, the student world was all agog, seeking to
answer those questions flatly and quite off-hand, instead of waiting
for experience of life to give the answer for them. Brenton, meantime,
was becoming ten times the force he had been at Saint Peter's; the only
trouble lay in the fact that now his force was, not formative, but
deformative.
"He's making himself a reputation, fast enough," Dolph Dennison said,
one day. "How much good he is accomplishing, though, is another
question."
To Dolph's surprise, Olive opposed him.
"Isn't there always good in simple, downright sincerity?" she queried.
"Not a bit of it," Dolph assured her bluntly, for a certain talk
between them, weeks before, a talk disastrous to the best of Dolph's
plans for life, had in no sense put an end to their good friendship.
"Sincerity itself is nothing. It's the thing one gets sincere about."
Then, without waiting for an answer, "What a woman you are, Olive!" he
said.
"Because I stand up for Mr. Brenton?"
"Because, down in your secret heart, you rather admire him for his
confounded weaknesses." Dolph spoke with increasing bluntness.
"Not for his weaknesses, Dolph. The man is plucky and sincere. For the
sake of the things that he believes are true, he will give up, has
given up, more than most of us will ever gain."
Dolph plunged his fists into his pockets.
"Hang it all, Olive! Do be concrete," he bade her.
"I will, if I can," she said fearlessly. "It's only that the things
themselves aren't too concrete."
"No." Dolph spoke incisively. "I should say they aren't. Olive look
here. Don't get your values muddled, at this stage of the game."
Despite their friendship, she looked up at him haughtily.
"What do you mean, Dolph?"
For a minute, he stared down at her, smiling slightly and with a look
in his eyes that nullified the frank brutality of his next words.
"Don't get mawkish over Brenton, Olive, just because he is a pitiful
weakling who, in spite of all his good intentions, has made a
consistent mess of everything he's tried to do. Because a man is weak,
he isn't necessarily more lovable. Because he has an incurable disease,
he isn't, of necessity, any more a subject for idolatry. No; I don't
mean that to lap over on to Opdyke, either. If ever a man was healthy,
Opdyke is that man. But Brenton isn't. His logic and his conscience
both are full of bacteria, bad little bacteria that swim around and
mess things. He may pull out of it, of course, and make something in
the end. Then, you can set him up on a pedestal and stick flowers in
his fair hair. For the present, though, do keep sane about him, and
deplore him, not admire."
"Aren't you a little hard on him, Dolph?" Olive asked steadily,
although her cheeks were burning with the truth of his implied accusal.
"No; I'm not."