THE LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE
From the vantage point of his rooms in the parish house, Hodder reviewed
the situation. And despite the desires thronging after him in his flight
he had the feeling of once who, in the dark, has been very near to
annihilation. What had shaken him most was the revelation of an old
enemy which, watching its chance, had beset him at the first opportunity;
and at a time when the scheme of life, which he flattered himself to have
solved forever, was threatening once more to resolve itself into
fragments. He had, as if by a miracle, escaped destruction in some
insidious form.
He shrank instinctively from an analysis of the woman in regard to
whom his feelings were, so complicated, and yet by no means lacking in
tenderness. But as time went on, he recognized more and more that she
had come into his life at a moment when he was peculiarly vulnerable.
She had taken him off his guard. That the brilliant Mrs. Larrabbee
should have desired him--or what she believed was him--was food enough
for thought, was an indication of an idealism in her nature that he would
not have suspected. From a worldly point of view, the marriage would
have commended itself to none of her friends. Yet Hodder perceived
clearly that he could not have given her what she desired, since the
marriage would have killed it in him. She offered him the other thing.
Once again he had managed somehow to cling to his dream of what the
relationship between man and woman should be, and he saw more and more
distinctly that he had coveted not only the jewel, but its setting. He
could not see her out of it--she faded. Nor could he see himself in it.
Luxury,--of course,--that was what he had spurned. Luxury in contrast
to Dalton Street, to the whirring factories near the church which
discharged, at nightfall, their quotas of wan women and stunted children.
And yet here he was catering to luxury, providing religion for it!
Religion!
Early in November he heard that Mrs. Larrabbee had suddenly decided to go
abroad without returning home. . . .
That winter Hodder might have been likened to a Niagara for energy; an
unharnessed Niagara--such would have been his own comment. He seemed to
turn no wheels, or only a few at least, and feebly. And while the
spectacle of their rector's zeal was no doubt an edifying one to his
parishioners, they gave him to understand that they would have been
satisfied with less. They admired, but chided him gently; and in
February Mr. Parr offered to take him to Florida. He was tired, and it
was largely because he dreaded the reflection inevitable in a period of
rest, that he refused. . . . And throughout these months, the feeling
recurred, with increased strength, that McCrae was still watching him,
--the notion persisted that his assistant held to a theory of his own,
if he could but be induced to reveal it. Hodder refrained from making
the appeal. Sometimes he was on the point of losing patience with this
enigmatic person.
Congratulations on the fact that his congregation was increasing brought
him little comfort, since a cold analysis of the newcomers who were
renting pews was in itself an indication of the lack of that thing he
so vainly sought. The decorous families who were now allying themselves
with St. John's did so at the expense of other churches either more
radical or less fashionable. What was it he sought? What did he wish?
To fill the church to overflowing with the poor and needy as well as the
rich, and to enter into the lives of all. Yet at a certain point he met
a resistance that was no less firm because it was baffling. The Word, on
his lips at least, seemed to have lost it efficacy. The poor heeded it
not, and he preached to the rich as from behind a glass. They went on
with their carnival. Why this insatiate ambition on his part in an age
of unbelief? Other clergymen, not half so fortunate, were apparently
satisfied; or else--from his conversation with them--either oddly
optimistic or resigned. Why not he?
It was strange, in spite of everything, that hope sprang up within him,
a recurrent geyser.
Gradually, almost imperceptibly, he found himself turning more and
more towards that line of least resistance which other churches were
following, as the one Modern Solution,--institutional work. After all,
in the rescuing of bodies some method might yet be discovered to revive
the souls. And there were the children! Hodder might have been likened
to an explorer, seeking a direct path when there was none--a royal road.
And if this were oblique it offered, at least, a definite outlet for his
energy.
Such was, approximately, the state of his mind early in March when Gordon
Atterbury came back from a conference in New York on institutional work,
and filled with enthusiasm. St. John's was incredibly behind the times,
so he told Hodder, and later the vestry. Now that they had, in Mr.
Hodder, a man of action and ability--ahem! there was no excuse for a
parish as wealthy as St. John's, a parish with their opportunities,
considering the proximity of Dalton Street neighbourhood, not enlarging
and modernizing the parish house, not building a settlement house with
kindergartens, schools, workshops, libraries, a dispensary and day
nurseries. It would undoubtedly be an expense--and Mr. Atterbury looked
at Mr. Parr, who drummed on the vestry table. They would need extra
assistants, deaconesses, trained nurses, and all that. But there were
other churches in the city that were ahead of St. John's--a reproach
--ahem!
Mr. Parr replied that he had told the rector that he stood ready to
contribute to such a scheme when he, the rector; should be ready to
approve it. And he looked at Mr. Hodder.
Mr. Hodder said he had been considering the matter ever since his
arrival. He had only one criticism of institutional work, that in his
observation it did not bring the people whom it reached into the Church
in any great numbers. Perhaps that were too much to ask, in these days.
For his part he would willingly assume the extra burden, and he was far
from denying the positive good such work accomplished through association
and by the raising of standards.
Mr. Ferguson declared his readiness to help. Many of his salesgirls, he
said, lived in this part of the city, and he would be glad to do anything
in his power towards keeping them out of the dance-halls and such places.
A committee was finally appointed consisting of Mr. Parr, Mr. Atterbury,
and the rector, to consult architects and to decide upon a site.
Hodder began a correspondence with experts in other cities,
collected plans, pamphlets, statistics; spent hours with the great
child-specialist, Dr. Jarvis, and with certain clergymen who believed
in institutionalism as the hope of the future.
But McCrae was provokingly non-committal.
"Oh, they may try it," he assented somewhat grudgingly, one day when the
rector had laid out for his inspection the architects' sketch for the
settlement house. "No doubt it will help many poor bodies along."
"Is there anything else?" the rector asked, looking searchingly at his
assistant.
"It may as well be that," replied McCrae.
The suspicion began to dawn on Hodder that the Scotch man's ideals were
as high as his own. Both of them, secretly, regarded the new scheme as a
compromise, a yielding to the inevitable . . . .
Mr. Ferguson's remark that an enlarged parish house and a new settlement
house might help to keep some of the young women employed in his
department store out of the dance-halls interested Hodder, who conceived
the idea of a dance-hall of their own. For the rector, in the course of
his bachelor shopping, often resorted to the emporium of his vestryman,
to stand on the stairway which carried him upward without lifting his
feet, to roam, fascinated, through the mazes of its aisles, where he
invariably got lost, and was rescued by suave floor-walkers or pert young
women in black gowns and white collars and cuffs. But they were not all
pert--there were many characters, many types. And he often wondered
whether they did not get tired standing on their feet all day long,
hesitating to ask them; speculated on their lives--flung as most of them
were on a heedless city, and left to shift for themselves. Why was it
that the Church which cared for Mr. Ferguson's soul was unable to get
in touch with, or make an appeal to, those of his thousand employees?
It might indeed have been said that Francis Ferguson cared for his own
soul, as he cared for the rest of his property, and kept it carefully
insured,--somewhat, perhaps, on the principle of Pascal's wager. That
he had been a benefactor to his city no one would deny who had seen the
facade that covered a whole block in the business district from Tower to
Vine, surmounted by a red standard with the familiar motto, "When in
doubt, go to Ferguson's." At Ferguson's you could buy anything from a
pen-wiper to a piano or a Paris gown; sit in a cool restaurant in summer
or in a palm garden in winter; leave your baby--if you had one--in charge
of the most capable trained nurses; if your taste were literary, mull
over the novels in the Book Department; if you were stout, you might be
reduced in the Hygiene Department, unknown to your husband and intimate
friends. In short, if there were any virtuous human wish in the power of
genius to gratify, Ferguson's was the place. They, even taught you how
to cook. It was a modern Aladdin's palace: and, like everything else
modern, much more wonderful than the original. And the soda might be
likened to the waters of Trevi,--to partake of which is to return.
"When in doubt, go to Ferguson!" Thus Mrs. Larrabbee and other ladies
interested in good works had altered his motto. He was one of the
supporters of Galt House, into which some of his own young saleswomen had
occasionally strayed; and none, save Mr. Parr alone, had been so liberal
in his gifts. Holder invariably found it difficult to reconcile the
unassuming man, whose conversation was so commonplace, with the titanic
genius who had created Ferguson's; nor indeed with the owner of the
imposing marble mansion at Number 5, Park Street.
The rector occasionally dined there. He had acquired a real affection
for Mrs. Ferguson, who resembled a burgomaster's wife in her evening
gowns and jewels, and whose simple social ambitions had been gratified
beyond her dreams. Her heart had not shrunken in the process, nor had
she forgotten her somewhat heterogeneous acquaintances in the southern
part of the city. And it was true that when Gertrude Constable had
nearly died of appendicitis, it was on this lady's broad bosom that Mrs.
Constable had wept. Mrs. Ferguson had haunted the house, regardless of
criticism, and actually quivering with sympathy. Her more important
dinner parties might have been likened to ill-matched fours-in-hand, and
Holder had sometimes felt more of pity than of amusement as she sat with
an expression of terror on her face, helplessly watching certain unruly
individuals taking their bits in their teeth and galloping madly
downhill. On one occasion, when he sat beside her, a young man, who
shall be nameless, was suddenly heard to remark in the midst of an
accidental lull:
"I never go to church. What's the use? I'm afraid most of us don't
believe in hell any more."
A silence followed: of the sort that chills. And the young man, glancing
down the long board at the clergyman, became as red as the carnation in
his buttonhole, and in his extremity gulped down more champagne.
"Things are in a dreadful state nowadays!" Mrs. Ferguson gasped to
a paralyzed company, and turned an agonized face to Holder. "I'm so
sorry," she said, "I don't know why I asked him to-night, except that
I have to have a young man for Nan, and he's just come to the city,
and I was sorry for him. He's very promising in a business way;
he's in Mr. Plimpton's trust company."
"Please don't let it trouble you." Holder turned and smiled a little,
and added whimsically: "We may as well face the truth."
"Oh, I should expect you to be good about it, but it was unpardonable,"
she cried . . . .
In the intervals when he gained her attention he strove, by talking
lightly of other things, to take her mind off the incident, but somehow
it had left him strangely and--he felt--disproportionately depressed,
--although he had believed himself capable of facing more or less
philosophically that condition which the speaker had so frankly
expressed. Yet the remark, somehow, had had an illuminating effect
like a flashlight, revealing to him the isolation of the Church as never
before. And after dinner, as they were going to the smoking-room, the
offender accosted him shamefacedly.
"I'm awfully sorry, Mr. Holder," he stammered.
That the tall rector's regard was kindly did not relieve his discomfort.
Hodder laid a hand on his shoulder.
"Don't worry about it," he answered, "I have only one regret as to what
you said--that it is true."
The other looked at him curiously.
"It's mighty decent of you to take it this way," he laid. Further speech
failed him.
He was a nice-looking young man, with firm white teeth, and honesty was
written all over his boyish face. And the palpable fact that his regret
was more on the clergyman's account than for the social faux pas drew
Holder the more, since it bespoke a genuineness of character.
He did not see the yearning in the rector's eyes as he turned away. . .
Why was it they could not be standing side by side, fighting the same
fight? The Church had lost him, and thousands like him, and she needed
them; could not, indeed, do without them.
Where, indeed, were the young men? They did not bother their heads about
spiritual matters any more. But were they not, he asked himself, franker
than many of these others, the so-called pillars of the spiritual
structure?
Mr. Plimpton accosted him. "I congratulate you upon the new plans, Mr.
Hodder,--they're great," he said. "Mr. Parr and our host are coming down
handsomely, eh? When we get the new settlement house we'll have a plant
as up-to-date as any church in the country. When do you break ground?"
"Not until autumn, I believe," Hodder replied. "There are a good many
details to decide upon yet."
"Well, I congratulate you."
Mr. Plimpton was forever congratulating.
"Up-to-date"--"plant"! More illuminating words, eloquent of Mr.
Plimpton's ideals. St. John's down at the heels, to be brought up to the
state of efficiency of Mr. Plimpton's trust company! It was by no means
the first time he had heard modern attributes on Mr. Plimpton's lips
applied to a sacred institution, but to-night they had a profoundly
disquieting effect. To-night, a certain clairvoyance had been vouchsafed
him, and he beheld these men, his associates and supporters, with a
detachment never before achieved.
They settled in groups about the room, which was square and high, and
panelled in Italian walnut, with fluted pilasters,--the capitals of which
were elaborately carved. And Hodder found himself on a deep leather sofa
in a corner engaged in a desultory and automatic conversation with
Everett Constable. Mr. Plimpton, with a large cigar between his lips,
was the radiating centre of one of the liveliest groups, and of him
the rector had fallen into a consideration, piecing together bits of
information that hitherto had floated meaninglessly in his mind.
It was Mrs. Larrabbee who had given character to the career of the still
comparatively youthful and unquestionably energetic president of the
Chamber of Commerce by likening it to a great spiral, starting somewhere
in outer regions of twilight, and gradually drawing nearer to the centre,
from which he had never taken his eyes. At the centre were Eldon Parr
and Charlotte Gore. Wallis Plimpton had made himself indispensable to
both.
His campaign for the daughter of Thurston Gore had been comparable to one
of the great sieges of history, for Mr. Plimpton was a laughing-stock
when he sat down before that fortress. At the end of ten years,
Charlotte had capitulated, with a sigh of relief, realizing at last her
destiny. She had become slightly stout, revealing, as time went on, no
wrinkles--a proof that the union was founded on something more enduring
than poetry: Statesmanship--that was the secret! Step by step, slowly
but surely, the memoranda in that matrimonial portfolio were growing
into accomplished facts; all events, such as displacements of power, were
foreseen; and the Plimptons, like Bismarck, had only to indicate, in case
of sudden news, the pigeonhole where the plan of any particular campaign
was filed.
Mrs. Larrabbee's temptation to be witty at the expense of those for whom
she had no liking had led Hodder to discount the sketch. He had not
disliked Mr. Plimpton, who had done him many little kindnesses. He was
good-natured, never ruffled, widely tolerant, hail-fellow-well-met with
everybody, and he had enlivened many a vestry meeting with his stories.
It were hypercritical to accuse him of a lack of originality. And if by
taking thought, he had arrived, from nowhere, at his present position of
ease and eminence, success had not turned to ashes in his mouth. He
fairly exhaled well-being, happiness, and good cheer. Life had gone well
with him, he wished the same to others.
But to-night, from his corner, Hodder seemed to see Mr. Plimpton with new
eyes. Not that he stood revealed a villain, which he was far from being;
it was the air of sophistication, of good-natured if cynical acceptance
of things as they were--and plenty good enough, too!--that jarred upon
the rector in his new mood, and it was made manifest to him as never
before why his appeals from the pulpit had lacked efficacy. Mr. Plimpton
didn't want the world changed! And in this desire he represented the
men in that room, and the majority of the congregation of St. John's.
The rector had felt something of this before, and it seemed to him
astonishing that the revelation had not come to him sooner. Did any one
of them, in his heart, care anything for the ideals and aspirations of
the Church?
As he gazed at them through the gathering smoke they had become
strangers, receded all at once to a great distance. . . . Across
the room he caught the name, Bedloe Hubbell, pronounced with peculiar
bitterness by Mr. Ferguson. At his side Everett Constable was alert,
listening.
"Ten years ago," said a stout Mr. Varnum, the President of the Third
National Bank, "if you'd told me that that man was to become a demagogue
and a reformer, I wouldn't have believed you. Why, his company used to
take rebates from the L. & G., and the Southern--I know it." He
emphasized the statement with a blow on the table that made the liqueur
glasses dance. "And now, with his Municipal League, he's going to clean
up the city, is he? Put in a reform mayor. Show up what he calls the
Consolidated Tractions Company scandal. Pooh!"
"You got out all right, Varnum. You won't be locked up," said Mr.
Plimpton, banteringly.
"So did you," retorted Varnum.
"So did Ferguson, so did Constable."
"So did Eldon Parr," remarked another man, amidst a climax of laughter.
"Langmaid handled that pretty well."
Hodder felt Everett Constable fidget.
"Bedloe's all right, but he's a dreamer," Mr. Plimpton volunteered.
"Then I wish he'd stop dreaming," said Mr. Ferguson, and there was more
laughter, although he had spoken savagely.
"That's what he is, a dreamer," Varnum ejaculated. "Say, he told George
Carter the other day that prostitution wasn't necessary, that in fifty
years we'd have largely done away with it. Think of that, and it's as
old as Sodom and Gomorrah!"
"If Hubbell had his way, he'd make this town look like a Connecticut
hill village--he'd drive all the prosperity out of it. All the railroads
would have to abandon their terminals--there'd be no more traffic, and
you'd have to walk across the bridge to get a drink."
"Well," said Mr. Plimpton, "Tom Beatty's good enough for me, for a
while."
Beatty, Hodder knew, was the "boss," of the city, with headquarters in a
downtown saloon.
"Beatty's been maligned," Mr. Varnum declared. "I don't say he's a
saint, but he's run the town pretty well, on the whole, and kept the vice
where it belongs, out of sight. He's made his pile, but he's entitled to
something we all are. You always know where you stand with Beatty. But
say, if Hubbell and his crowd--"
"Don't worry about Bedloe,--he'll get called in, he'll come home to roost
like the rest of them," said Mr. Plimpton, cheerfully. "The people can't
govern themselves,--only Bedloe doesn't know it. Some day he'll find it
out." . . .
The French window beside him was open, and Hodder slipped out, unnoticed,
into the warm night and stood staring at the darkness. His one desire
had been to get away, out of hearing, and he pressed forward over the
tiled pavement until he stumbled against a stone balustrade that guarded
a drop of five feet or so to the lawn below. At the same time he heard
his name called.
"Is that you, Mr. Hodder?"
He started. The voice had a wistful tremulousness, and might almost
have been the echo of the leaves stirring in the night air. Then he
perceived, in a shaft of light from one of the drawing-room windows near
by, a girl standing beside the balustrade; and as she came towards him,
with tentative steps, the light played conjurer, catching the silvery
gauze of her dress and striking an aura through the film of her hair.
"It's Nan Ferguson," she said.
"Of course," he exclaimed, collecting himself. "How stupid of me not to
have recognized you!"
"I'm so glad you came out," she went on impulsively, yet shyly, "I wanted
to tell you how sorry I was that that thing happened at the table."
"I like that young man," he said.
"Do you?" she exclaimed, with unexpected gratitude. So do I. He really
isn't--so bad as he must seem."
"I'm sure of it," said the rector, laughing.
"I was afraid you'd think him wicked," said Nan. "He works awfully hard,
and he's sending a brother through college. He isn't a bit like--some
others I know. He wants to make something of himself. And I feel
responsible, because I had mother ask him to-night."
He read her secret. No doubt she meant him to do so.
"You know we're going away next week, for the summer--that is, mother and
I," she continued. "Father comes later. And I do hope you'll make us
a visit, Mr. Hodder--we were disappointed you couldn't come last year."
Nan hesitated, and thrusting her hand into her gown drew forth an
envelope and held it out to him. "I intended to give you this to-night,
to use--for anything you thought best."
He took it gravely. She looked up at him.
"It seems so little--such a selfish way of discharging one's obligations,
just to write out a cheque, when there is so much trouble in the world
that demands human kindness as well as material help. I drove up Dalton
Street yesterday, from downtown. You know how hot it was! And I
couldn't help thinking how terrible it is that we who have everything
are so heedless of all that misery. The thought of it took away all
my pleasure.
"I'd do something more, something personal, if I could. Perhaps I shall
be able to, next winter. Why is it so difficult for all of us to know
what to do?"
"We have taken a step forward, at any rate, when we know that it is
difficult," he said.
She gazed up at him fixedly, her attention caught by an indefinable
something in his voice, in his smile, that thrilled and vaguely disturbed
her. She remembered it long afterwards. It suddenly made her shy again;
as if, in faring forth into the darkness, she had come to the threshold
of a mystery, of a revelation withheld; and it brought back the sense of
adventure, of the palpitating fear and daring with which she had come to
meet him.
"It is something to know," she repeated, half comprehending. The
scraping of chairs within alarmed her, and she stood ready to fly.
"But I haven't thanked you for this," he said, holding up the envelope.
"It may be that I shall find some one in Dalton Street--"
"Oh, I hope so," she faltered, breathlessly, hesitating a moment. And
then she was gone, into the house.