The new Catholic church was the largest and most imposing public
building in Octavius. Even in its unfinished condition, with a bald
roofing of weather-beaten boards marking on the stunted tower the place
where a spire was to begin later on, it dwarfed every other edifice of
the sort in the town, just as it put them all to shame in the matter of
the throngs it drew, rain or shine, to its services.
These facts had not heretofore been a source of satisfaction to the Rev.
Theron Ware. He had even alluded to the subject in terms which gave his
wife the impression that he actively deplored the strength and size of
the Catholic denomination in this new home of theirs, and was troubled
in his mind about Rome generally. But this evening he walked along
the extended side of the big structure, which occupied nearly half the
block, and then, turning the corner, passed in review its wide-doored,
looming front, without any hostile emotions whatever. In the gathering
dusk it seemed more massive than ever before, but he found himself only
passively considering the odd statement he had heard that all Catholic
Church property was deeded absolutely in the name of the Bishop of the
diocese.
Only a narrow passage-way separated the church from the pastorate--a
fine new brick residence standing flush upon the street. Theron mounted
the steps, and looked about for a bell-pull. Search revealed instead a
little ivory button set in a ring of metal work. He picked at this for
a time with his finger-nail, before he made out the injunction, printed
across it, to push. Of course! how stupid of him! This was one of those
electric bells he had heard so much of, but which had not as yet made
their way to the class of homes he knew. For custodians of a mediaeval
superstition and fanaticism, the Catholic clergy seemed very much up to
date. This bell made him feel rather more a countryman than ever.
The door was opened by a tall gaunt woman, who stood in black relief
against the radiance of the hall-way while Theron, choosing his words
with some diffidence, asked if the Rev. Mr. Forbes was in.
“He is” came the hush-voiced answer. “He's at dinner, though.”
It took the young minister a second or two to bring into association in
his mind this evening hour and this midday meal. Then he began to say
that he would call again--it was nothing special--but the woman suddenly
cut him short by throwing the door wide open.
“It's Mr. Ware, is it not?” she asked, in a greatly altered tone. “Sure,
he'd not have you go away. Come inside--do, sir!--I'll tell him.”
Theron, with a dumb show of reluctance, crossed the threshold. He noted
now that the woman, who had bustled down the hall on her errand, was
gray-haired and incredibly ugly, with a dark sour face, glowering black
eyes, and a twisted mouth. Then he saw that he was not alone in the
hall-way. Three men and two women, all poorly clad and obviously working
people, were seated in meek silence on a bench beyond the hat-rack. They
glanced up at him for an instant, then resumed their patient study of
the linoleum pattern on the floor at their feet.
“And will you kindly step in, sir?” the elderly Gorgon had returned to
ask. She led Mr. Ware along the hall-way to a door near the end, and
opened it for him to pass before her.
He entered a room in which for the moment he could see nothing but a
central glare of dazzling light beating down from a great shaded
lamp upon a circular patch of white table linen. Inside this ring of
illumination points of fire sparkled from silver and porcelain, and two
bars of burning crimson tracked across the cloth in reflection from tall
glasses filled with wine. The rest of the room was vague darkness; but
the gloom seemed saturated with novel aromatic odors, the appetizing
scent of which bore clear relation to what Theron's blinking eyes rested
upon.
He was able now to discern two figures at the table, outside the glowing
circle of the lamp. They had both risen, and one came toward him with
cordial celerity, holding out a white plump hand in greeting. He took
this proffered hand rather limply, not wholly sure in the half-light
that this really was Father Forbes, and began once more that everlasting
apology to which he seemed doomed in the presence of the priest. It was
broken abruptly off by the other's protesting laughter.
“My dear Mr. Ware, I beg of you,” the priest urged, chuckling with
hospitable mirth, “don't, don't apologize! I give you my word, nothing
in the world could have pleased us better than your joining us here
tonight. It was quite dramatic, your coming in as you did. We were
speaking of you at that very moment. Oh, I forgot--let me make you
acquainted with my friend--my very particular friend, Dr. Ledsmar. Let
me take your hat; pray draw up a chair. Maggie will have a place laid
for you in a minute.”
“Oh, I assure you--I couldn't think of it--I've just eaten
my--my--dinner,” expostulated Theron. He murmured more inarticulate
remonstrances a moment later, when the grim old domestic appeared with
plates, serviette, and tableware for his use, but she went on spreading
them before him as if she heard nothing. Thus committed against a decent
show of resistance, the young minister did eat a little here and there
of what was set before him, and was human enough to regret frankly
that he could not eat more. It seemed to him very remarkable cookery,
transfiguring so simple a thing as a steak, for example, quite out of
recognition, and investing the humble potato with a charm he had never
dreamed of. He wondered from time to time if it would be polite to ask
how the potatoes were cooked, so that he might tell Alice.
The conversation at the table was not continuous, or even enlivened.
After the lapses into silence became marked, Theron began to suspect
that his refusal to drink wine had annoyed them--the more so as he had
drenched a large section of table-cloth in his efforts to manipulate a
siphon instead. He was greatly relieved, therefore, when Father Forbes
explained in an incidental way that Dr. Ledsmar and he customarily ate
their meals almost without a word.
“It's a philosophic fad of his,” the priest went on smilingly, “and I
have fallen in with it for the sake of a quiet life; so that when we do
have company--that is to say, once in a blue moon--we display no manners
to speak of.”
“I had always supposed--that is, I've always heard--that it was more
healthful to talk at meals,” said Theron. “Of course--what I mean--I
took it for granted all physicians thought so.”
Dr. Ledsmar laughed. “That depends so much upon the quality of the
meals!” he remarked, holding his glass up to the light.
He seemed a man of middle age and an equable disposition. Theron,
stealing stray glances at him around the lampshade, saw most distinctly
of all a broad, impressive dome of skull, which, though obviously the
result of baldness, gave the effect of quite belonging to the face.
There were gold-rimmed spectacles, through which shone now and again the
vivid sparkle of sharp, alert eyes, and there was a nose of some sort
not easy to classify, at once long and thick. The rest was thin hair and
short round beard, mouse-colored where the light caught them, but losing
their outlines in the shadows of the background. Theron had not heard of
him among the physicians of Octavius. He wondered if he might not be a
doctor of something else than medicine, and decided upon venturing the
question.
“Oh, yes, it is medicine,” replied Ledsmar. “I am a doctor three or four
times over, so far as parchments can make one. In some other respects,
though, I should think I am probably less of a doctor than anybody else
now living. I haven't practised--that is, regularly--for many years, and
I take no interest whatever in keeping abreast of what the profession
regards as its progress. I know nothing beyond what was being taught in
the sixties, and that I am glad to say I have mostly forgotten.”
“Dear me!” said Theron. “I had always supposed that Science was the most
engrossing of pursuits--that once a man took it up he never left it.”
“But that would imply a connection between Science and Medicine!”
commented the doctor. “My dear sir, they are not even on speaking
terms.”
“Shall we go upstairs?” put in the priest, rising from his chair. “It
will be more comfortable to have our coffee there--unless indeed, Mr.
Ware, tobacco is unpleasant to you?”
“Oh, my, no!” the young minister exclaimed, eager to free himself from
the suggestion of being a kill-joy. “I don't smoke myself; but I am very
fond of the odor, I assure you.”
Father Forbes led the way out. It could be seen now that he wore a long
house-gown of black silk, skilfully moulded to his erect, shapely, and
rounded form. Though he carried this with the natural grace of a proud
and beautiful belle, there was no hint of the feminine in his bearing,
or in the contour of his pale, firm-set, handsome face. As he moved
through the hall-way, the five people whom Theron had seen waiting rose
from their bench, and two of the women began in humble murmurs, “If you
please, Father,” and “Good-evening to your Riverence;” but the priest
merely nodded and passed on up the staircase, followed by his guests.
The people sat down on their bench again.
A few minutes later, reclining at his ease in a huge low chair, and
feeling himself unaccountably at home in the most luxuriously appointed
and delightful little room he had ever seen, the Rev. Theron Ware sipped
his unaccustomed coffee and embarked upon an explanation of his errand.
Somehow the very profusion of scholarly symbols about him--the great
dark rows of encased and crowded book-shelves rising to the ceiling,
the classical engravings upon the wall, the revolving book-case, the
reading-stand, the mass of littered magazines, reviews, and papers at
either end of the costly and elaborate writing-desk--seemed to make
it the easier for him to explain without reproach that he needed
information about Abram. He told them quite in detail the story of his
book.
The two others sat watching him through a faint haze of scented smoke,
with polite encouragement on their faces. Father Forbes took the added
trouble to nod understandingly at the various points of the narrative,
and when it was finished gave one of his little approving chuckles.
“This skirts very closely upon sorcery,” he said smilingly. “Do
you know, there is perhaps not another man in the country who knows
Assyriology so thoroughly as our friend here, Dr. Ledsmar.”
“That's putting it too strong,” remarked the Doctor. “I only follow at
a distance--a year or two behind. But I daresay I can help you. You are
quite welcome to anything I have: my books cover the ground pretty well
up to last year. Delitzsch is very interesting; but Baudissin's 'Studien
zur Semitischen Religionsgeschichte' would come closer to what you need.
There are several other important Germans--Schrader, Bunsen, Duncker,
Hommel, and so on.”
“Unluckily I--I don't read German readily,” Theron explained with
diffidence.
“That's a pity,” said the doctor, “because they do the best work--not
only in this field, but in most others. And they do so much that the
mass defies translation. Well, the best thing outside of German of
course is Sayce. I daresay you know him, though.”
The Rev. Mr. Ware shook his head mournfully. “I don't seem to know any
one,” he murmured.
The others exchanged glances.
“But if I may ask, Mr. Ware,” pursued the doctor, regarding their guest
with interest through his spectacles, “why do you specially hit upon
Abraham? He is full of difficulties--enough, just now, at any rate, to
warn off the bravest scholar. Why not take something easier?”
Theron had recovered something of his confidence. “Oh, no,” he said,
“that is just what attracts me to Abraham. I like the complexities and
contradictions in his character. Take for instance all that strange
and picturesque episode of Hagar: see the splendid contrast between the
craft and commercial guile of his dealings in Egypt and with Abimelech,
and the simple, straightforward godliness of his later years. No, all
those difficulties only attract me. Do you happen to know--of course
you would know--do those German books, or the others, give anywhere any
additional details of the man himself and his sayings and doings--little
things which help, you know, to round out one's conception of the
individual?”
Again the priest and the doctor stole a furtive glance across the young
minister's head. It was Father Forbes who replied.
“I fear that you are taking our friend Abraham too literally, Mr. Ware,”
he said, in that gentle semblance of paternal tones which seemed to go
so well with his gown. “Modern research, you know, quite wipes him out
of existence as an individual. The word 'Abram' is merely an eponym--it
means 'exalted father.' Practically all the names in the Genesis
chronologies are what we call eponymous. Abram is not a person at all:
he is a tribe, a sept, a clan. In the same way, Shem is not intended for
a man; it is the name of a great division of the human race. Heber is
simply the throwing back into allegorical substance, so to speak, of the
Hebrews; Heth of the Hittites; Asshur of Assyria.”
“But this is something very new, this theory, isn't it?” queried Theron.
The priest smiled and shook his head. “Bless you, no! My dear sir, there
is nothing new. Epicurus and Lucretius outlined the whole Darwinian
theory more than two thousand years ago. As for this eponym thing, why
Saint Augustine called attention to it fifteen hundred years ago. In
his 'De Civitate Dei,' he expressly says of these genealogical names,
'GENTES NON HOMINES;' that is, 'peoples, not persons.' It was as obvious
to him--as much a commonplace of knowledge--as it was to Ezekiel eight
hundred years before him.”
“It seems passing strange that we should not know it now, then,”
commented Theron; “I mean, that everybody shouldn't know it.”
Father Forbes gave a little purring chuckle. “Ah, there we get upon
contentious ground,” he remarked. “Why should 'everybody' be supposed
to know anything at all? What business is it of 'everybody's' to know
things? The earth was just as round in the days when people supposed it
to be flat, as it is now. So the truth remains always the truth, even
though you give a charter to ten hundred thousand separate numskulls to
examine it by the light of their private judgment, and report that it is
as many different varieties of something else. But of course that whole
question of private judgment versus authority is No-Man's-Land for us.
We were speaking of eponyms.”
“Yes,” said Theron; “it is very interesting.”
“There is a curious phase of the subject which hasn't been worked out
much,” continued the priest. “Probably the Germans will get at that too,
sometime. They are doing the best Irish work in other fields, as it is.
I spoke of Heber and Heth, in Genesis, as meaning the Hebrews and the
Hittites. Now my own people, the Irish, have far more ancient legends
and traditions than any other nation west of Athens; and you find in
their myth of the Milesian invasion and conquest two principal leaders
called Heber and Ith, or Heth. That is supposed to be comparatively
modern--about the time of Solomon's Temple. But these independent Irish
myths go back to the fall of the Tower of Babel, and they have there an
ancestor, grandson of Japhet, named Fenius Farsa, and they ascribe
to him the invention of the alphabet. They took their ancient name of
Feine, the modern Fenian, from him. Oddly enough, that is the name which
the Romans knew the Phoenicians by, and to them also is ascribed the
invention of the alphabet. The Irish have a holy salmon of knowledge,
just like the Chaldean man-fish. The Druids' tree-worship is identical
with that of the Chaldeans--those pagan groves, you know, which the Jews
were always being punished for building. You see, there is nothing new.
Everything is built on the ruins of something else. Just as the material
earth is made up of countless billions of dead men's bones, so the
mental world is all alive with the ghosts of dead men's thoughts and
beliefs, the wraiths of dead races' faiths and imaginings.”
Father Forbes paused, then added with a twinkle in his eye: “That
peroration is from an old sermon of mine, in the days when I used to
preach. I remember rather liking it, at the time.”
“But you still preach?” asked the Rev. Mr. Ware, with lifted brows.
“No! no more! I only talk now and again,” answered the priest, with what
seemed a suggestion of curtness. He made haste to take the conversation
back again. “The names of these dead-and-gone things are singularly
pertinacious, though. They survive indefinitely. Take the modern name
Marmaduke, for example. It strikes one as peculiarly modern, up-to-date,
doesn't it? Well, it is the oldest name on earth--thousands of years
older than Adam. It is the ancient Chaldean Meridug, or Merodach. He was
the young god who interceded continually between the angry, omnipotent
Ea, his father, and the humble and unhappy Damkina, or Earth, who was
his mother. This is interesting from another point of view, because
this Merodach or Marmaduke is, so far as we can see now, the original
prototype of our 'divine intermediary' idea. I daresay, though, that if
we could go back still other scores of centuries, we should find whole
receding series of types of this Christ-myth of ours.”
Theron Ware sat upright at the fall of these words, and flung a
swift, startled look about the room--the instinctive glance of a man
unexpectedly confronted with peril, and casting desperately about for
means of defence and escape. For the instant his mind was aflame with
this vivid impression--that he was among sinister enemies, at the mercy
of criminals. He half rose under the impelling stress of this feeling,
with the sweat standing on his brow, and his jaw dropped in a scared and
bewildered stare.
Then, quite as suddenly, the sense of shock was gone; and it was as if
nothing at all had happened. He drew a long breath, took another sip of
his coffee, and found himself all at once reflecting almost pleasurably
upon the charm of contact with really educated people. He leaned back in
the big chair again, and smiled to show these men of the world how much
at his ease he was. It required an effort, he discovered, but he made it
bravely, and hoped he was succeeding.
“It hasn't been in my power to at all lay hold of what the world keeps
on learning nowadays about its babyhood,” he said. “All I have done is
to try to preserve an open mind, and to maintain my faith that the more
we know, the nearer we shall approach the Throne.”
Dr. Ledsmar abruptly scuffled his feet on the floor, and took out his
watch. “I'm afraid--” he began.
“No, no! There's plenty of time,” remarked the priest, with his soft
half-smile and purring tones. “You finish your cigar here with Mr. Ware,
and excuse me while I run down and get rid of the people in the hall.”
Father Forbes tossed his cigar-end into the fender. Then he took from
the mantel a strange three-cornered black-velvet cap, with a dangling
silk tassel at the side, put it on his head, and went out.
Theron, being left alone with the doctor, hardly knew what to do or say.
He took up a paper from the floor beside him, but realized that it would
be impolite to go farther, and laid it on his knee. Some trace of that
earlier momentary feeling that he was in hostile hands came back, and
worried him. He lifted himself upright in the chair, and then became
conscious that what really disturbed him was the fact that Dr. Ledsmar
had turned in his seat, crossed his legs, and was contemplating him with
a gravely concentrated scrutiny through his spectacles.
This uncomfortable gaze kept itself up a long way beyond the point of
good manners; but the doctor seemed not to mind that at all.