I
Looking back over an extraordinary career, it is interesting to attempt
to fix the time when a name becomes a talisman, and passes current for
power. This is peculiarly difficult in the case of Eldon Parr. Like many
notable men before him, nobody but Mr. Parr himself suspected his future
greatness, and he kept the secret. But if we are to search what is now
ancient history for a turning-point, perhaps we should find it in the
sudden acquisition by him of the property of Mr. Bentley.
The transaction was a simple one. Those were the days when gentlemen,
as matters of courtesy, put their names on other gentlemen's notes;
and modern financiers, while they might be sorry for Mr. Bentley, would
probably be unanimous in the opinion that he was foolish to write on the
back of Thomas Garrett's. Mr. Parr was then, as now, a business man, and
could scarcely be expected to introduce philanthropy into finance. Such
had been Mr. Bentley's unfortunate practice. And it had so happened,
a few years before, for the accommodation of some young men of his
acquaintance that he had invested rather generously in Grantham mining
stock at twenty-five cents a share, and had promptly forgotten the
transaction. To cut a long story short, in addition to Mr. Bentley's
house and other effects, Mr. Parr became the owner of the Grantham
stock, which not long after went to one hundred dollars. The reader may
do the figuring.
Where was some talk at this time, but many things had happened since.
For example, Mr. Parr had given away great sums in charity. And it may
likewise be added in his favour that Mr. Bentley was glad to be rid of
his fortune. He had said so. He deeded his pew back to St. John's, and
protesting to his friends that he was not unhappy, he disappeared from
the sight of all save a few. The rising waters of Prosperity closed over
him. But Eliza Preston, now Mrs. Parr, was one of those who were never
to behold him again,--in this world, at least.
She was another conspicuous triumph in that career we are depicting.
Gradual indeed had been the ascent from the sweeping out of a store to
the marrying of a Preston, but none the less sure inevitable. For many
years after this event, Eldon Parr lived modestly in what was known as a
“stone-front” house in Ransome Street, set well above the sidewalk, with
a long flight of yellow stone steps leading to it; steps scrubbed with
Sapoho twice a week by a negro in rubber boots. There was a stable with
a tarred roof in the rear, to be discerned beyond the conventional side
lawn that was broken into by the bay window of the dining-room.
There, in that house, his two children were born: there, within those
inartistic walls, Eliza Preston lived a life that will remain a closed
book forever. What she thought, what she dreamed, if anything, will
never be revealed. She did not, at least, have neurasthenia, and for all
the world knew, she may have loved her exemplary and successful
husband, with whom her life was as regular as the Strasburg clock.
She breakfasted at eight and dined at seven; she heard her children's
lessons and read them Bible stories; and at half past ten every Sunday
morning, rain or shine, walked with them and her husband to the cars on
Tower Street to attend service at St. John's, for Mr. Parr had scruples
in those days about using the carriage on the Sabbath.
She did not live, alas, to enjoy for long the Medicean magnificence
of the mansion facing the Park, to be a companion moon in the greater
orbit. Eldon Part's grief was real, and the beautiful English window in
the south transept of the church bears witness to it. And yet it cannot
be said that he sought solace in religion, so apparently steeped in it
had he always been. It was destiny that he should take his place on the
vestry; destiny, indeed, that he should ultimately become the vestry
as well as the first layman of the diocese; unobtrusively, as he had
accomplished everything else in life, in spite of Prestons and Warings,
Atterburys, Goodriches, and Gores. And he was wont to leave his weighty
business affairs to shift for themselves while he attended the diocesan
and general conventions of his Church.
He gave judiciously, as becomes one who holds a fortune in trust, yet
generously, always permitting others to help, until St. John's was a
very gem of finished beauty. And, as the Rothschilds and the Fuggera
made money for grateful kings and popes, so in a democratic age, Eldon
Parr became the benefactor of an adulatory public. The university, the
library, the hospitals, and the parks of his chosen city bear witness.
II
For forty years, Dr. Gilman had been the rector of St. John's. One
Sunday morning, he preached his not unfamiliar sermon on the text, “For
now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face,” and when
the next Sunday dawned he was in his grave in Winterbourne Cemetery,
sincerely mourned within the parish and without. In the nature of mortal
things, his death was to be expected: no less real was the crisis to be
faced At the vestry meeting that followed, the problem was tersely set
forth by Eldon Parr, his frock coat tightly buttoned about his chest,
his glasses in his hand.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “we have to fulfil a grave responsibility to the
parish, to the city, and to God. The matter of choosing a rector to-day,
when clergymen are meddling with all sorts of affairs which do not
concern them, is not so simple as it was twenty years ago. We have, at
St. John's, always been orthodox and dignified, and I take it to be the
sense of this vestry that we remain so. I conceive it our duty to find
a man who is neither too old nor too young, who will preach the faith
as we received it, who is not sensational, and who does not mistake
socialism for Christianity.”
By force of habit, undoubtedly, Mr. Parr glanced at Nelson Langmaid as
he sat down. Innumerable had been the meetings of financial boards at
which Mr. Parr had glanced at Langmaid, who had never failed to
respond. He was that sine qua non of modern affairs, a corporation
lawyer,--although he resembled a big and genial professor of
Scandinavian extraction. He wore round, tortoise-shell spectacles, he
had a high, dome-like forehead, and an ample light brown beard which he
stroked from time to time. It is probable that he did not believe in the
immortality of the soul.
His eyes twinkled as he rose.
“I don't pretend to be versed in theology, gentlemen, as you know,” he
said, and the entire vestry, even Mr. Parr, smiled. For vestries, in
spite of black coats and the gravity of demeanour which first citizens
are apt to possess, are human after all. “Mr. Parr has stated, I
believe; the requirements, and I agree with him that it is not an easy
order to fill. You want a parson who will stick to his last, who will
not try experiments, who is not too high or too low or too broad or too
narrow, who has intellect without too much initiative, who can deliver
a good sermon to those who can appreciate one, and yet will not get the
church uncomfortably full of strangers and run you out of your pews. In
short, you want a level-headed clergyman about thirty-five years old who
will mind his own business.”
The smiles on the faces of the vestry deepened. The ability to put a
matter thus humorously was a part of Nelson Langmaid's power with men
and juries.
“I venture to add another qualification,” he continued, “and that is
virility. We don't want a bandbox rector. Well, I happen to have in mind
a young man who errs somewhat on the other side, and who looks a little
like a cliff profile I once saw on Lake George of George Washington
or an Indian chief, who stands about six feet two. He's a bachelor--if
that's a drawback. But I am not at all sure he can be induced to leave
his present parish, where he has been for ten years.”
“I am,” announced Wallis Plimpton, with his hands in his pockets,
“provided the right man tackles him.”
III
Nelson Langmaid's most notable achievement, before he accomplished
the greater one of getting a new rector for St. John's, had been to
construct the “water-tight box” whereby the Consolidated Tractions
Company had become a law-proof possibility. But his was an esoteric
reputation,--the greater fame had been Eldon Parr's. Men's minds had
been dazzled by the breadth of the conception of scooping all the
street-car lines of the city, long and short, into one big basket, as it
were; and when the stock had been listed in New York, butcher and baker,
clerk and proprietor, widow and maid, brought out their hoardings; the
great project was discussed in clubs, cafes, and department stores,
and by citizens hanging on the straps of the very cars that were to be
consolidated--golden word! Very little appeared about Nelson Langmaid,
who was philosophically content. But to Mr. Parr, who was known to
dislike publicity, were devoted pages in the Sunday newspapers, with
photographs of the imposing front of his house in Park Street, his altar
and window in St. John's, the Parr building, and even of his private
car, Antonia.
Later on, another kind of publicity, had come. The wind had whistled
for a time, but it turned out to be only a squall. The Consolidated
Tractions Company had made the voyage for which she had been
constructed, and thus had fulfilled her usefulness; and the cleverest
of the rats who had mistaken her for a permanent home scurried ashore
before she was broken up.
All of which is merely in the nature of a commentary on Mr. Langmaid's
genius. His reputation for judgment--which by some is deemed the highest
of human qualities--was impaired; and a man who in his time had selected
presidents of banks and trust companies could certainly be trusted to
choose a parson--particularly if the chief requirements were not of a
spiritual nature...
A week later he boarded an east-bound limited train, armed with plenary
powers.
His destination was the hill town where he had spent the first fifteen
years of his life, amid the most striking of New England landscapes, and
the sight of the steep yet delicately pastoral slopes never failed to
thrill him as the train toiled up the wide valley to Bremerton. The
vision of these had remained with him during the years of his toil in
the growing Western city, and embodied from the first homesick days an
ideal to which he hoped sometime permanently to return. But he never
had. His family had shown a perversity of taste in preferring the sea,
and he had perforce been content with a visit of a month or so every
other summer, accompanied usually by his daughter, Helen. On such
occasions, he stayed with his sister, Mrs. Whitely.
The Whitely mills were significant of the new Bremerton, now neither
village nor city, but partaking of the characteristics of both. French
Canadian might be heard on the main square as well as Yankee; and that
revolutionary vehicle, the automobile, had inspired there a great brick
edifice with a banner called the Bremerton House. Enterprising Italians
had monopolized the corners with fruit stores, and plate glass and
asphalt were in evidence. But the hills looked down unchanged, and in
the cool, maple-shaded streets, though dotted with modern residences,
were the same demure colonial houses he had known in boyhood.
He was met at the station by his sister, a large, matronly woman who
invariably set the world whizzing backward for Langmaid; so completely
did she typify the contentment, the point of view of an age gone by.
For life presented no more complicated problems to the middle-aged Mrs.
Whitely than it had to Alice Langmaid.
“I know what you've come for, Nelson,” she said reproachfully, when she
greeted him at the station. “Dr. Gilman's dead, and you want our Mr.
Hodder. I feel it in my bones. Well, you can't get him. He's had ever so
many calls, but he won't leave Bremerton.”
She knew perfectly well, however, that Nelson would get him, although
her brother characteristically did not at once acknowledge his mission.
Alice Whitely had vivid memories of a childhood when he had never failed
to get what he wanted; a trait of his of which, although it had before
now caused her much discomfort, she was secretly inordinately proud. She
was, therefore, later in the day not greatly surprised to find herself
supplying her brother with arguments. Much as they admired and loved
Mr. Hodder, they had always realized that he could not remain buried in
Bremerton. His talents demanded a wider field.
“Talents!” exclaimed Langmaid, “I didn't know he had any.”
“Oh, Nelson, how can you say such a thing, when you came to get him!”
exclaimed his sister.
“I recommended him because I thought he had none,” Langmaid declared.
“He'll be a bishop some day--every one says so,” said Mrs. Whitely,
indignantly.
“That reassures me,” said her brother.
“I can't see why they sent you--you hardly ever go to church,” she
cried. “I don't mind telling you, Nelson, that the confidence men place
in you is absurd.”
“You've said that before,” he replied. “I agree with you. I'm not going
on my judgment--but on yours and Gerald's, because I know that you
wouldn't put up with anything that wasn't strictly all-wool orthodox.”
“I think you're irreverent,” said his sister, “and it's a shame that the
canons permit such persons to sit on the vestry....”
“Gerald,” asked Nelson Langmaid of his brother-in-law that night, after
his sister and the girls had gone to bed, “are you sure that this young
man's orthodox?”
“He's been here for over ten years, ever since he left the seminary, and
he's never done or said anything radical yet,” replied the mill owner of
Bremerton. “If you don't want him, we'd be delighted to have him stay.
We're not forcing him on you, you know. What the deuce has got into you?
You've talked to him for two hours, and you've sat looking at him at the
dinner table for another two. I thought you were a judge of men.”
Nelson Langmaid sat silent.
“I'm only urging Hodder to go for his own good,” Mr. Whitely continued.
“I can take you to dozens of people to-morrow morning who worship
him,--people of all sorts; the cashier in the bank, men in the mills,
the hotel clerk, my private stenographer--he's built up that little
church from nothing at all. And you may write the Bishop, if you wish.”
“How has he built up the church?” Langmaid demanded
“How? How does any clergyman buildup a church
“I don't know,” Langmaid confessed. “It strikes me as quite a tour de
force in these days. Does he manage to arouse enthusiasm for orthodox
Christianity?”
“Well,” said Gerard Whitely, “I think the service appeals. We've made it
as beautiful as possible. And then Mr. Hodder goes to see these people
and sits up with them, and they tell him their troubles. He's reformed
one or two rather bad cases. I suppose it's the man's personality.”
Ah! Langmaid exclaimed, “now you're talking!”
“I can't see what you're driving at,” confessed his brother-in-law.
“You're too deep for me, Nelson.”
If the truth be told, Langmaid himself did not quits see. On behalf
of the vestry, he offered next day to Mr. Hodder the rectorship of St.
John's and that offer was taken under consideration; but there was in
the lawyer's mind no doubt of the acceptance, which, in the course of a
fortnight after he had returned to the West, followed.
By no means a negligible element in Nelson Langmaid's professional
success had been his possession of what may called a sixth sense,
and more than once, on his missions of trust, he had listened to its
admonitory promptings.
At times he thought he recognized these in his conversation with the
Reverend John Hodder at Bremerton,--especially in that last interview in
the pleasant little study of the rectory overlooking Bremerton Lake. But
the promptings were faint, and Langmaid out of his medium. He was not
choosing the head of a trust company.
He himself felt the pull of the young clergyman's personality, and
instinctively strove to resist it: and was more than ever struck by Mr.
Hodder's resemblance to the cliff sculpture of which he had spoken at
the vestry meeting.
He was rough-hewn indeed, with gray-green eyes, and hair the color of
golden sand: it would not stay brushed. It was this hair that hinted
most strongly of individualism, that was by no means orthodox. Langmaid
felt an incongruity, but he was fascinated; and he had discovered on the
rector's shelves evidences of the taste for classical authors that he
himself possessed. Thus fate played with him, and the two men ranged
from Euripides to Horace, from Horace to Dante and Gibbon. And when
Hodder got up to fetch this or that edition, he seemed to tower over the
lawyer, who was a big man himself.
Then they discussed business, Langmaid describing the parish, the
people, the peculiar situation in St. John's caused by Dr. Gilman's
death, while Hodder listened. He was not talkative; he made no promises;
his reserve on occasions was even a little disconcerting; and it
appealed to the lawyer from Hodder as a man, but somehow not as a
clergyman. Nor did the rector volunteer any evidences of the soundness
of his theological or political principles.
He gave Langmaid the impression--though without apparent egotism--that
by accepting the call he would be conferring a favour on St. John's; and
this was when he spoke with real feeling of the ties that bound him to
Bremerton. Langmaid felt a certain deprecation of the fact that he was
not a communicant.
For the rest, if Mr. Hodder were disposed to take himself and his
profession seriously, he was by no means lacking in an appreciation of
Langmaid's humour....
The tempering of the lawyer's elation as he returned homeward to report
to Mr. Parr and the vestry may be best expressed by his own exclamation,
which he made to himself:
“I wonder what that fellow would do if he ever got started!” A parson
was, after all, a parson, and he had done his best.
IV
A high, oozing note of the brakes, and the heavy train came to a
stop. Hodder looked out of the window of the sleeper to read the sign
'Marcion' against the yellow brick of the station set down in the
prairie mud, and flanked by a long row of dun-colored freight cars
backed up to a factory.
The factory was flimsy, somewhat resembling a vast greenhouse with its
multitudinous windows, and bore the name of a firm whose offices were in
the city to which he was bound.
“We 'most in now, sah,” the negro porter volunteered. “You kin see the
smoke yondah.”
Hodder's mood found a figure in this portentous sign whereby the city's
presence was betrayed to travellers from afar,--the huge pall seemed an
emblem of the weight of the city's sorrows; or again, a cloud of her own
making which shut her in from the sight of heaven. Absorbed in the mad
contest for life, for money and pleasure and power she felt no need to
lift her eyes beyond the level of her material endeavours.
He, John Hodder, was to live under that cloud, to labour under it. The
mission on which he was bound, like the prophets of old, was somehow to
gain the ears of this self-absorbed population, to strike the fear of
the eternal into their souls, to convince them that there was Something
above and beyond that smoke which they ignored to their own peril.
Yet the task, at this nearer view, took on proportions overwhelming--so
dense was that curtain at which he gazed. And to-day the very skies
above it were leaden, as though Nature herself had turned atheist. In
spite of the vigour with which he was endowed, in spite of the belief
in his own soul, doubts assailed him of his ability to cope with this
problem of the modern Nineveh--at the very moment when he was about to
realize his matured ambition of a great city parish.
Leaning back on the cushioned seat, as the train started again, he
reviewed the years at Bremerton, his first and only parish. Hitherto (to
his surprise, since he had been prepared for trials) he had found the
religious life a primrose path. Clouds had indeed rested on Bremerton's
crests, but beneficent clouds, always scattered by the sun. And there,
amid the dazzling snows, he had on occasions walked with God.
His success, modest though it were, had been too simple. He had
loved the people, and they him, and the pang of homesickness he now
experienced was the intensest sorrow he had known since he had been
among them. Yes, Bremerton had been for him (he realized now that he had
left it) as near an approach to Arcadia as this life permits, and the
very mountains by which it was encircled had seemed effectively to shut
out those monster problems which had set the modern world outside to
seething. Gerald Whitely's thousand operatives had never struck; the
New York newspapers, the magazines that discussed with vivid animus
the corporation-political problems in other states, had found Bremerton
interested, but unmoved; and Mrs. Whitely, who was a trustee of the
library, wasted her energy in deploring the recent volumes on economics,
sociology, philosophy, and religion that were placed on the shelves. If
Bremerton read them--and a portion of Bremerton did--no difference
was apparent in the attendance at Hodder's church. The Woman's Club
discussed them strenuously, but made no attempt to put their doctrines
into practice.
Hodder himself had but glanced at a few of them, and to do him justice
this abstention had not had its root in cowardice. His life was
full--his religion “worked.” And the conditions with which these books
dealt simply did not exist for him. The fact that there were other
churches in the town less successful than his own (one or two, indeed,
virtually starving) he had found it simple to account for in that their
denominations had abandoned the true conception of the Church, and were
logically degenerating into atrophy. What better proof of the barrenness
of these modern philosophical and religious books did he need than
the spectacle of other ministers--who tarried awhile on starvation
salaries--reading them and preaching from them?
He, John Hodder, had held fast to the essential efficacy of the word of
God as propounded in past ages by the Fathers. It is only fair to
add that he did so without pride or bigotry, and with a sense of
thankfulness at the simplicity of the solution (ancient, in truth!)
which, apparently by special grace, had been vouchsafed him. And to it
he attributed the flourishing condition in which he had left the Church
of the Ascension at Bremerton.
“We'll never get another rector like you,” Alice Whitely had exclaimed,
with tears in her eyes, as she bade him good-by. And he had rebuked her.
Others had spoken in a similar strain, and it is a certain tribute
to his character to record that the underlying hint had been lost on
Hodder. His efficacy, he insisted, lay in the Word.
Hodder looked at his watch, only to be reminded poignantly of the chief
cause of his heaviness of spirit, for it represented concretely the
affections of those whom he had left behind; brought before him vividly
the purple haze of the Bremerton valley, and the garden party, in the
ample Whitely grounds, which was their tribute to him. And he beheld,
moving from the sunlight to shadow, the figure of Rachel Ogden. She
might have been with him now, speeding by his side into the larger life!
In his loneliness, he seemed to be gazing into reproachful eyes. Nothing
had passed between them. It, was he who had held back, a fact that in
the retrospect caused him some amazement. For, if wifehood were to be
regarded as a profession, Rachel Ogden had every qualification. And Mrs.
Whitely's skilful suggestions had on occasions almost brought him to
believe in the reality of the mirage,--never quite.
Orthodox though he were, there had been times when his humour had borne
him upward toward higher truths, and he had once remarked that promising
to love forever was like promising to become President of the United
States.
One might achieve it, but it was independent of the will. Hodder's
ideals--if he had only known--transcended the rubric. His feeling for
Rachel Ogden had not been lacking in tenderness, and yet he had recoiled
from marriage merely for the sake of getting a wife, albeit one with
easy qualification. He shrank instinctively from the humdrum, and sought
the heights, stormy though these might prove. As yet he had not analyzed
this craving.
This he did know--for he had long ago torn from his demon the draperies
of disguise--that women were his great temptation. Ordination had not
destroyed it, and even during those peaceful years at Bremerton he had
been forced to maintain a watchful guard. He had a power over women,
and they over him, that threatened to lead him constantly into wayside
paths, and often he wondered what those who listened to him from the
pulpit would think if they guessed that at times, he struggled with
suggestion even now. Yet, with his hatred of compromises, he had scorned
marriage.
The yoke of Augustine! The caldron of unholy loves! Even now, as he sat
in the train, his mind took its own flight backward into that remoter
past that was still a part of him: to secret acts of his college days
the thought of which made him shudder; yes, and to riots and revels. In
youth, his had been one of those boiling, contagious spirits that carry
with them, irresistibly, tamer companions. He had been a leader in
intermittent raids into forbidden spheres; a leader also in certain more
decorous pursuits--if athletics may be so accounted; yet he had capable
of long periods of self-control, for a cause. Through it all a spark had
miraculously been kept alive....
Popularity followed him from the small New England college to the
Harvard Law School. He had been soberer there, marked as a pleader, and
at last the day arrived when he was summoned by a great New York lawyer
to discuss his future. Sunday intervened. Obeying a wayward impulse, he
had gone to one of the metropolitan churches to hear a preacher renowned
for his influence over men. There is, indeed, much that is stirring to
the imagination in the spectacle of a mass of human beings thronging
into a great church, pouring up the aisles, crowding the galleries,
joining with full voices in the hymns. What drew them? He himself was
singing words familiar since childhood, and suddenly they were fraught
with a startling meaning!
“Fill me, radiancy divine,
Scatter all my unbelief!”
Visions of the Crusades rose before him, of a friar arousing France,
of a Maid of Orleans; of masses of soiled, war-worn, sin-worn humanity
groping towards the light. Even after all these ages, the belief, the
hope would not down.
Outside, a dismal February rain was falling, a rain to wet the soul.
The reek of damp clothes pervaded the gallery where he sat surrounded by
clerks and shop girls, and he pictured to himself the dreary rooms from
which they had emerged, drawn by the mysterious fire on that altar. Was
it a will-o'-the-wisp? Below him, in the pews, were the rich. Did they,
too, need warmth?
Then came the sermon, “I will arise and go to my father.”
After the service, far into the afternoon, he had walked the wet streets
heedless of his direction, in an exaltation that he had felt before, but
never with such intensity. It seemed as though he had always wished to
preach, and marvelled that the perception had not come to him sooner.
If the man to whom he had listened could pour the light into the dark
corners of other men's souls, he, John Hodder, felt the same hot spark
within him,--despite the dark corners of his own!
At dusk he came to himself, hungry, tired, and wet, in what proved to be
the outskirts of Harlem. He could see the place now: the lonely, wooden
houses, the ramshackle saloon, the ugly, yellow gleam from the street
lamps in a line along the glistening pavement; beside him, a towering
hill of granite with a real estate sign, “This lot for sale.” And he had
stood staring at it, thinking of the rock that would have to be cut away
before a man could build there,--and so read his own parable.
How much rock would have to be cut away, how much patient chipping
before the edifice of which he had been dreaming could be reared! Could
he ever do it? Once removed, he would be building on rock. But could
he remove it?... To help revive a faith, a dying faith, in a material
age,--that indeed were a mission for any man! He found his way to an
elevated train, and as it swept along stared unseeing at the people who
pushed and jostled him. Still under the spell, he reached his room and
wrote to the lawyer thanking him, but saying that he had reconsidered
coming to New York. It was not until he had posted the letter, and was
on his way back to Cambridge that he fully realized he had made the
decision of his life.
Misgivings, many of them, had come in the months that followed,
misgivings and struggles, mocking queries. Would it last? There was the
incredulity and amazement of nearest friends, who tried to dissuade him
from so extraordinary a proceeding. Nobody, they said, ever became
a parson in these days; nobody, at least, with his ability. He
was throwing himself away. Ethics had taken the place of religion;
intelligent men didn't go to church. And within him went on an endless
debate. Public opinion made some allowance for frailties in other
professions; in the ministry, none: he would be committing himself to be
good the rest of his life, and that seemed too vast an undertaking for
any human.
The chief horror that haunted him was not failure,--for oddly enough he
never seriously distrusted his power, it was disaster. Would God give
him the strength to fight his demon? If he were to gain the heights,
only to stumble in the sight of all men, to stumble and fall.
Seeming echoes of the hideous mockery of it rang in his ears: where
is the God that this man proclaimed? he saw the newspaper headlines,
listened in imagination to cynical comments, beheld his name trailed
through the soiled places of the cities, the shuttlecock of men and
women. “To him that overcometh, to him will I give of the hidden
manna, and I will give him a white stone, and upon the stone a new name
written, which no one knoweth but he that receiveth it.” Might he ever
win that new name, eat of the hidden manna of a hidden power, become the
possessor of the morning star?
Unless there be in the background a mother, no portrait of a man is
complete. She explains him, is his complement. Through good mothers are
men conceived of God: and with God they sit, forever yearning, forever
reaching out, helpless except for him: with him, they have put a man
into the world. Thus, into the Supreme Canvas, came the Virgin.
John Hodder's mother was a widow, and to her, in the white, gabled house
which had sheltered stern ancestors, he travelled in the June following
his experience. Standing under the fan-light of the elm-shaded doorway,
she seemed a vision of the peace wherein are mingled joy and sorrow,
faith and tears! A tall, quiet woman, who had learned the lesson
of mothers,--how to wait and how to pray, how to be silent with a
clamouring heart.
She had lived to see him established at Bremerton, to be with him there
awhile....
He awoke from these memories to gaze down through the criss-cross of a
trestle to the twisted, turbid waters of the river far below. Beyond
was the city. The train skirted for a while the hideous, soot-stained
warehouses that faced the water, plunged into a lane between humming
factories and clothes-draped tenements, and at last glided into
semi-darkness under the high, reverberating roof of the Union Station.