"Which is which?" he queried. "No; don't get testy, Olive. I'm not
producing any brief for Opdyke. In fact, he doesn't need one; we both
of us know already what he stands for. But I do hate to see a girl like
you go off her head about such a man as Brenton, a man with a Christian
Science wife and a thrilling voice and speaking eyes: all deadly assets
for a misunderstood ex-preacher. No; I do not like Brenton. He's not my
sort. Neither, for the fact of it, is he your sort."
Olive compressed her lips.
"I may help to make him so," she said.
"Best let him make himself; he's had too many formative fingers in his
pie, already. Besides," Dolph's lips curled into an irrepressible
smile; "how do you know it would be for his advantage?"
For one instant, Olive struggled with her pique. Then she cast it off,
and looked up at Dolph with her old smile.
"You hit hard, Dolph," she told him; "but I'm not sure you aren't in
the right of it, after all. I like Mr. Brenton. I am sorry for him;
perhaps it has muddled my values, as you call it, to be on the inside
circle of his advisers. Still, there is something to be said upon the
other side. You can't comprehend a man like Mr. Brenton, if you try."
"Why not? Not that I've tried over much, though," Dolph added, in hasty
confession.
"It wouldn't have done you any good, if you had tried," Olive assured
him flatly. "You haven't a single point in common. By ancestry and
training, you're as unlike as a Zulu and an Eskimo. You began at about
the point where Mr. Brenton, if he's lucky, will leave off. Your
great-great-grandparents settled once for all the questions that he's
agonizing over now. Naturally, you don't remember their struggles, and
so you can't see why his should take it out of him, any more than you
can see why a personable man like him ever could have married--"
"What your father aptly terms the She-Gargoyle?" Dolph inquired. "No; I
can't. But then the question arises promptly, how can you?"
Olive smiled a little sadly. Loath though she was to acknowledge it to
Dolph, of late she had been finding out that comprehension does not
always make for full approval.
"As you say, Dolph," she told him; "it's the woman of me. After our own
fashion, we every one of us are natural nurses; we know when our
menfolk are in pain."
"Not always, Olive." Dolph spoke sadly.
"Yes, Dolph, we do. Hard as it is, though, sometimes we have to admit
we have no cure for that especial pain. Still, you can be quite sure
that it isn't easy for us to turn away and leave it, unhealed and
aching." Then she threw off the little allegory, and once more spoke
with spirit. "Dolph, we're created in mental couples, I suspect. Much
as I care for Reed, it was you who had the insight to plan how he could
make his life over into something besides the bare existence we all
were dreading. In the same way, I may be the one to take in the tragedy
of Mr. Brenton's indeterminate existence, and make it just a little
lighter, if only by my understanding. Anyway, I mean to try."
She turned in across the lawn, leaving Dolph to stare after her
retreating figure with no small anxiety.
"Blast the understanding!" he said profanely. "And then, blast the
preacher!"
The poor preacher, however, for preacher still he was, in spite of the
reversal of his collar fastenings, was feeling himself already blasted.
He had been spending a long hour in the doctor's laboratory; and the
doctor, for the once, had turned his back upon his pans and trays of
cultures, and lavished his entire attention on his visitor.
"It's just here, Brenton," he said quietly, after an hour of argument;
"you can do one of two things: you can keep to your text and teach
those girls straight chemistry; or--"
Brenton faced him squarely, squarely capped the sentence with a single
word.
"Resign."
"Yes."
"You mean you think I am a failure in my teaching?"
"No. Your teaching is all right. You are a born chemist and a born
teacher. It's your infernal preaching I object to," the doctor told him
unexpectedly.
"My preaching?"
"Yes. You employ your pulpit methods in your classes. You take a
chemical text, and then turn and twist it into any sort of a
metaphysical conclusion that appeals to you at the minute. No; wait! I
am talking. Science is not equivocal, Brenton. It's as downright and
determinate as A+B. It's what we know; not what we think we ought to
think about the things we know. And it's science you are there to
teach, not glittering abstractions having to do with man's latter end.
The fact is, you've spent so long in trying to subject your theology to
scientific proof that, now you're surfeited with science, you are
trying to use it as a feeder to your theologic fires."
"Not consciously," Brenton objected, as a flush crept up across his
cheeks. "I have meant--"
The doctor interrupted, but not unkindly.
"Consciously or unconsciously, it's all one, Brenton, as concerns the
output. You must bridle your scientific imagination and your tongue, or
else you'll have the whole college by the ears. For the present, you
are letting off harmless rockets. Before you know it, though, you'll be
dynamiting the whole establishment. Best go slow."
Brenton attempted one last stand.
"Have I any right to go slow, doctor, when there's a principle
involved? Have I any right to suppress eternal truths--"
Then the doctor lost his temper.
"Eternal pollywogs!" he burst out. "Man, you're daft. Who told you what
truths are eternal? Who told you where science ends, and where theology
begins? Who told you what we mean, when we say _provable_? For two
thousand years, and then some more, we have been slowly sifting down a
whole mass of ill-assorted beliefs into two great facts: Creator and
created. For practical purposes, isn't that all we need to know? Isn't
it all that we any of us can grasp: the surety that the Creative Mind
would never have taken the trouble to fashion us, in the first place if
he hadn't put inside us all the needful germs of progress, all the
needful intellect to grasp the evident duty that lies just ahead? What
else, then, do you need? No. Don't try to talk about it. Just go out
and take a good, long walk in the fresh air, and forget your latter end
in the more important concerns of deep breathing. You are getting
disgustingly round-shouldered. Good bye. And, by the way, I'll tell
Olive you will be back here to dinner."
But Brenton, going on his way, was totally oblivious to the doctor's
sage counsel as to the merits of deep breathing. Neither did he realize
in the least the splendid optimism of the stern old doctor's creed. For
the hour, optimism was quite beyond his ken. He only realized that his
own world had gone bad; that failure awaited him at every turn, not a
downright and practical failure, either, but a nebulous and
indeterminate futility. His life had been nothing but one restless
struggle to arrive at something finite, something which should satisfy
alike his heart and reason. Instead of gaining the one thing, it seemed
to him that all had been lost. His present existence was as focusless
as an eye after its lens has been extracted. His past had been opaque,
his future would be permanently blurred. And for what good had been all
the pain? It would have been far better, far more sane, if he had clung
stoutly to the flaming horns of his hereditary Calvinism. Infinitely
better to feel their scorching touch than to drift into a state of
apathy past any feeling! And Brenton wondered vaguely whether he ever
would feel anything again, anything, that is, as a personal issue,
rather than as a scrap of the great world-plan. Most things, nowadays,
left him conscious of being aloof, remote. Even the going away of his
wife. Even the death of--He pulled himself up short. Not the baby's
death. That was still personal, still very personal; personal was the
message of those little waving hands. What did the baby see? Something
denied for ever to his adult and doubting eyes?
Forgetful of the doctor's invitation to come back to dine, Brenton at
twilight found himself upon the long white bridge, his elbows on the
rail, his eyes upon the darkening surface of the river, as it swept
down upon him from out the purpling hills. As of old, its mystery held
him, the mystery of its ceaseless coming, the mystery of its ceaseless
going on and on, until it lost all individual existence in the
soundless, boundless sea. To-night, in the apathy which held his senses
in subjection, he watched it through the dying twilight, until it
ceased to be to him a river, but appeared to him as an embodiment of
life itself, coming, coming, coming down to him out of the purpling
distance, going, going, going down away from him into the deepening
shadows. And then the light died, and darkness crept across it all, and
then--extinction.
Next morning, he arranged it with Professor Opdyke that, for the
present, the other assistant should take over all of his lectures,
while he himself would put in his time inside the laboratory.