I
In these days of his preparation, she haunted him continually. In her
he saw typified all those who possessed the divine discontent, the
yearning unsatisfied,--the fatalists and the dreamers. And yet she
seemed to have risen through instinct to share the fire of his vision
of religion revealed to the countless ranks of strugglers as the hidden
motive-power of the world, the impetus of scientist, statesman, artist,
and philanthropist! They had stood together on the heights of the larger
view, whence the whole of the battle-line lay disclosed.
At other and more poignant moments he saw her as waving him bravely on
while he steamed out through towering seas to safety. The impression
was that of smiling at her destiny. Had she fixed upon it? and did
she linger now only that she might inspire him in his charge? She was
capable, he knew, of taking calmly the irrevocable step, of accepting
the decree as she read it. The thought tortured, the desire to save her
from herself obsessed him; with true clairvoyance she had divined him
aright when she had said that he wished her to have faith in him for her
own sake. Could he save her in spite of herself? and how? He could not
see her, except by chance. Was she waiting until he should have crossed
the bar before she should pay some inexorable penalty of which he knew
nothing?
Thus he speculated, suffered, was at once cast down and lifted up by
the thought of her. To him, at least, she was one of those rare and
dauntless women, the red stars of history, by whom the Dantes and
Leonardos are fired to express the inexpressible, and common clay is
fused and made mad: one of those women who, the more they reveal, become
the more inscrutable. Divinely inarticulate, he called her; arousing the
passion of the man, yet stirring the sublimer efforts of the god.
What her feelings toward him, whether she loved him as a woman loves a
man he could not say, no man being a judge in the supreme instance. She
beheld him emancipated, perhaps, from what she might have called the
fetters of an orthodoxy for which she felt an instinctive antagonism;
but whether, though proclaiming himself free, the fact of his
continuation in the ministry would not of itself set up in her a
reaction, he was unable to predict. Her antipathy to forms, he saw,
was inherent. Her interest--her fascinated absorption, it might be
called--in his struggle was spiritual, indeed, but it also had mixed
in it the individualistic zeal of the nonconformist. She resented the
trammels of society; though she suffered from her efforts to transcend
them. The course he had determined upon appeared to her as a rebellion
not only against a cut-and-dried state of mind, but also against vested
privilege. Yet she had in her, as she confessed, the craving for what
privilege brings in the way of harmonious surroundings. He loved her for
her contradictions.
Thus he was utterly unable to see what the future held for him in the
way of continued communion with her, to evolve any satisfactory theory
as to why she remained in the city. She had told him that the gardens
were an excuse. She had come, by her own intimation, to reflect, to
decide some momentous question. Marriage? He found this too agitating to
dwell upon, summoning, as it did, conjectures of the men she might have
known; and it was perhaps natural, in view of her attitude, that he
could only think of such a decision on her part as surrender.
That he had caught and held her attention, although by no conscious
effort of his own, was clear to him. But had he not merely arrested her?
Would she not presently disappear, leaving only in his life the scarlet
thread which she had woven into it for all time? Would he not fail to
change, permanently, the texture of hers?
Such were his hopes and fears concerning her, and they were mingled
inextricably with other hopes and fears which had to do with the great
venture of his life. He dwelt in a realm of paradoxes, discovered
that exaltation was not incompatible with anxiety and dread. He had
no thought of wavering; he had achieved to an extent he would not
have believed possible the sense of consecration which brings with
it indifference to personal fortunes, and the revelation of the inner
world, and yet he shrank from the wounds he was about to receive--and
give. Outwardly controlled, he lived in the state of intense excitement
of the leader waiting for the time to charge.
II
The moment was at hand. September had waned, the nights were cooling,
his parishioners were returning from the East. One of these was Eleanor
Goodrich, whom he met on a corner, tanned and revived from her long
summer in Massachusetts. She had inherited the kindly shrewdness of
glance characteristic of gentlefolk, the glance that seeks to
penetrate externals in its concern for the well-being of those whom it
scrutinizes. And he was subtly aware, though she greeted him cordially,
that she felt a change in him without being able to account for it.
“I hear you have been here all summer,” she said reproachfully. “Mother
and father and all of us were much disappointed that you did not come to
us on the Cape.”
“I should have come, if it had been possible,” he replied. “It seems to
have done you a world of good.”
“Oh, I!” She seemed slightly embarrassed, puzzled, and did not look at
him. “I am burned as disgracefully as Evelyn. Phil came on for a month.
“He tells me he hasn't seen you, but that isn't surprising, for he
hasn't been to church since June--and he's a vestryman now, too.”
She was in mourning for her father-in-law, who had died in the spring.
Phil Goodrich had taken his place. Eleanor found the conversation,
somehow, drifting out of her control. It was not at all what she would
have desired to say. Her colour heightened.
“I have not been conducting the services, but I resume them next
Sunday,” said the rector. “I ought to tell you,” he went on, regarding
her, “in view of the conversation we have had, that I have changed my
mind concerning a great many things we have talked about--although
I have not spoken of this as yet to any of the members of the
congregation.”
She was speechless, and could only stare at him blankly.
“I mean,” he continued, with a calmness that astonished her afterwards,
“that I have changed my whole conception as to the functions and future
of the Church, that I have come to your position, that we must make up
our minds for ourselves, and not have them made up for us. And that
we must examine into the truth of all statements, and be governed
accordingly.”
Her attitude was one of mingled admiration, concern, and awe. And he saw
that she had grasped something of the complications which his course was
likely to bring about.
“But you are not going to leave us!” she managed to exclaim.
“Not if it is possible to remain,” he said, smiling.
“I am so glad.” She was still overpowered by the disclosure. “It is good
of you to tell me. Do you mind my telling Phil?”
“Not at all,” he assured her.
“Will you forgive me,” she asked, after a slight pause during which she
had somewhat regained her composure, “if I say that I always thought,
or rather hoped you would change? that your former beliefs seemed
so--unlike you?”
He continued to smile at her as she stepped forward to take the car.
“I'll have to forgive you,” he answered, “because you were right--”
She was still in such a state of excitement when she arrived down town
that she went direct to her husband's law office.
“I like this!” he exclaimed, as, unannounced, she opened the door of
his sanctuary. “You might have caught me with one of those good-looking
clients of mine.”
“Oh, Phil!” she cried, “I've got such a piece of news, I couldn't resist
coming to tell you. I met Mr. Hodder--and he's changed.”
“Changed!” Phil repeated, looking up at her flushed face beside him.
Instead of a law-book, he flung down a time table in which he had been
investigating the trains to a quail shooting club in the southern part
of the state: The transition to Mr. Hodder was, therefore, somewhat
abrupt. “Why, Nell, to look at you, I thought it could be nothing else
than my somewhat belated appointment to the United States Supreme Court.
How has Hodder changed? I always thought him pretty decent.”
“Don't laugh at me,” she begged, “it's really serious--and no one knows
it yet. He said I might tell you. Do you remember that talk we had
at father's, when he first came, and we likened him to a modern
Savonarola?”
“And George Bridges took the floor, and shocked mother and Lucy and
Laureston,” supplied Phil.
“I don't believe mother really was as much shocked as she appeared to
be,” said Eleanor. “At any rate, the thing that had struck us--you and
me--was that Mr. Hodder looked as though he could say something helpful,
if he only would. And then I went to see him afterwards, in the parish
house--you remember?--after we had been reading modern criticism
together, and he told me that the faith which had come down from
the fathers was like an egg? It couldn't be chipped. I was awfully
disappointed--and yet I couldn't help liking him, he was so honest. And
the theological books he gave me to read--which were so mediaeval and
absurd! Well, he has come around to our point of view. He told me so
himself.”
“But what is our point of view, Nell?” her husband asked, with a smile.
“Isn't it a good deal like Professor Bridges', only we're not quite
so learned? We're just ordinary heathens, as far as I can make out. If
Hodder has our point of view, he ought to go into the law or a trust
company.”
“Oh, Phil!” she protested, “and you're on the vestry! I do believe in
Something, and so do you.”
“Something,” he observed, “is hardly a concrete and complete theology.”
“Why do you make me laugh,” she reproached him, “when the matter is so
serious? What I'm trying to tell you is that I'm sure Mr. Hodder has
worked it out. He's too sincere to remain in the Church and not have
something constructive and satisfying. I've always said that he seemed
to have a truth shut up inside of him which he could not communicate.
Well, now he looks as though he were about to communicate it, as though
he had discovered it. I suppose you think me silly, but you'll grant,
whatever Mr. Hodder may be, he isn't silly. And women can feel these
things. You know I'm not given to sentimentality, but I was never so
impressed by the growth in any personality as I was this morning by his.
He seems to have become himself, as I always imagined him. And, Phil, he
was so fine! He's absolutely incapable of posing, as you'll admit, and
he stood right up and acknowledged that he'd been wrong in our argument.
He hasn't had the services all summer, and when he resumes them next
Sunday I gathered that he intends to make his new position clear.”
Mr. Goodrich thrust his hands in his pockets and gave a low whistle.
“I guess I won't go shooting Saturday, after all,” he declared. “I
wouldn't miss Hodder's sermon for all the quail in Harrington County.”
“It's high time you did go to church,” remarked Eleanor, contemplating,
not without pride, her husband's close-cropped, pugnacious head.
“Your judgments are pretty sound, Nell. I'll do you that credit. And I've
always owned up that Hodder would be a fighter if he ever got started.
It's written all over him. What's more, I've a notion that some of our
friends are already a little suspicious of him.”
“You mean Mr. Parr?” she asked, anxiously.
“No, Wallis Plimpton.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed, with disdain in her voice.
“Mr. Parr only got back yesterday, and Wallis told me that Hodder had
refused to go on a yachting trip with him. Not only foolishness, but
high treason.” Phil smiled. “Plimpton's the weather-vane, the barometer
of that crowd--he feels a disturbance long before it turns up--he's as
sensitive as the stock market.”
“He is the stock market,” said Eleanor.
“It's been my opinion,” Phil went on reflectively, “that they've all had
just a trace of uneasiness about Hodder all along, an idea that Nelson
Langmaid slipped up for the first time in his life when he got him to
come. Oh, the feeling's been dormant, but it existed. And they've been
just a little afraid that they couldn't handle him if the time ever
came. He's not their type. When I saw Plimpton at the Country Club the
other day he wondered, in that genial, off-hand manner of his, whether
Hodder would continue to be satisfied with St. John's. Plimpton said he
might be offered a missionary diocese. Oh we'll have a fine old row.”
“I believe,” said Eleanor, “that that's the only thing that interests
you.”
“Well, it does please me,” he admitted, “when I think of Gordon Atterbury
and Everett Constable and a few others,--Eldon Parr,--who believe that
religion ought to be kept archaic and innocuous, served in a form that
won't bother anybody. By the way, Nell, do you remember the verse the
Professor quoted about the Pharisees, and cleansing the outside of the
cup and platter?”
“Yes,” she answered, “why?”
“Well--Hodder didn't give you any intimation as to what he intended to
do about that sort of thing, did he?”
“What sort of thing?”
“About the inside of Eldon Parr's cup,--so to speak. And the inside of
Wallis Plimpton's cup, and Everett Constable's cup, and Ferguson's cup,
and Langmaid's. Did it ever strike you that, in St. John's, we have the
sublime spectacle of Eldon Parr, the Pharisee in chief, conducting the
Church of Christ, who, uttered that denunciation? That's what George
Bridges meant. There's something rather ironical in such a situation, to
say the least.”
“I see,” said Eleanor, thoughtfully.
“And what's more, it's typical,” continued Phil, energetically, “the big
Baptist church on the Boulevard is run by old Sedges, as canny a rascal
as you could find in the state. The inside of has cup has never been
touched, though he was once immersed in the Mississippi, they say, and
swallowed a lot of water.”
“Oh, Phil!”
“Hodder's been pretty intimate with Eldon Parr--that always puzzled me,”
Phil went on. “And yet I'm like you, I never doubted Hodder's honesty.
I've always been curious to know what would happen when he found out the
kind of thing Eldon Parr is doing every day in his life, making people
stand and deliver in the interest of what he would call National
Prosperity. Why, that fellow, Funk, they sent to the penitentiary the
other day for breaking into the Addicks' house isn't a circumstance to
Eldon Parr. He's robbed his tens of thousands, and goes on robbing them
right along. By the way, Mr. Parr took most of Addicks' money before
Funk got his silver.”
“Phil, you have such a ridiculous way of putting things! But I suppose
it's true.”
“True! I should say it was! There was Mr. Bentley--that was mild. And
there never was a hold-up of a western express that could compare to the
Consolidated Tractions. Some of these big fellows have the same kind
of brain as the professional thieves. Well, they are professional
thieves--what's the use of mincing matters! They never try the same game
twice. Mr. Parr's getting ready to make another big haul right now. I
know, because Plimpton said as much, although he didn't confide in
me what this particular piece of rascality is. He knows better.” Phil
Goodrich looked grim.
“But the law?” exclaimed his wife.
“There never was a law that Nelson Langmaid couldn't drive a horse and
carriage through.”
“And Mr. Langmaid's one of the nicest men I know!”
“What I wonder,” mused Phil, “is whether this is a mere doctrinal revolt
on Hodder's part, or whether he has found out a few things. There are
so many parsons in these days who don't seem to see any inconsistency
in robbing several thousand people to build settlement houses and
carved marble altars, and who wouldn't accept a Christmas box from a
highwayman. But I'll do Hodder the justice to say he doesn't strike me
as that kind. And I have an idea that Eldon Parr and Wallis Plimpton
and the rest know he isn't, know that he'd be a Tartar if he ever get
started, and that's what makes them uneasy.”
“Then it isn't his change of religious opinions they would care about?”
said Eleanor.
“Oh, I don't say that Eldon Parr won't try to throw him out if he
questions the faith as delivered by the Saints.”
“Phil, what a way of putting it!”
“Any indication of independence, any approach to truth would be regarded
as dangerous,” Phil continued. “And of course Gordon Atterbury and others
we could mention, who think they believe in the unchipped egg theory,
will be outraged. But it's deeper than that. Eldon Parr will give orders
that Hodder's to go.”
“Give orders?”
“Certainly. That vestry, so far as Mr. Parr is concerned, is a mere
dummy board of directors. He's made Langmaid, and Plimpton, and even
Everett Constable, who's the son of an honourable gentleman, and ought
to know better. And he can ruin them by snapping his fingers. He can
even make the financial world too hot for Ferguson. I'll say this
for Gordon Atterbury, that Mr. Parr can't control him, but he's got a
majority without him, and Gordon won't vote for a heretic. Who are left,
except father-in-law Waring and myself?”
“He can't control either of you!” said Eleanor, proudly.
“When it comes to that, Nell--we'll move into Canada and buy a farm.”
“But can he hurt you, Phil--either of you?” she asked, after a moment.
“I'd like to see him try it,” Phil Goodrich declared
And his wife thought, as she looked at him, that she would like to see
Mr. Parr try it, too.
III
Phil Goodrich had once said that Mr. Plimpton's translation of the
national motto E pluribus unum, was “get together,” and it was true that
not the least of Mr. Plimpton's many gifts was that of peace making.
Such was his genius that he scented trouble before it became manifest
to the world, and he stoutly declared that no difference of opinion ever
existed between reasonable men that might not be patched up before the
breach became too wide--provided that a third reasonable man contributed
his services. The qualifying word “reasonable” is to be noted. When Mr.
Bedloe Hubbell had undertaken, in the name of Reform, to make a witch's
cauldron of the city's politics, which Mr. Beatty had hitherto
conducted so smoothly from the back room of his saloon, Mr. Plimpton had
unselfishly offered his services. Bedloe Hubbell, although he had been a
playmate of Mr. Plimpton's wife's, had not proved “reasonable,” and had
rejected with a scorn only to be deemed fanatical the suggestion that
Mr. Hubbell's interests and Mr. Beatty's interests need not clash, since
Mr. Hubbell might go to Congress! And Mr. Plimpton was the more hurt
since the happy suggestion was his own, and he had had no little
difficulty in getting Mr. Beatty to agree to it.
Yet Mr. Plimpton's career in the ennobling role of peacemaker had, on
the whole, been crowned with such success as to warrant his belief in
the principle. Mr. Parr, for instance,--in whose service, as in that
of any other friend, Mr. Plimpton was always ready to act--had had
misunderstandings with eminent financiers, and sometimes with United
States Senators. Mr. Plimpton had made many trips to the Capitol at
Washington, sometimes in company with Mr. Langmaid, sometimes not, and
on one memorable occasion had come away smiling from an interview with
the occupant of the White House himself.
Lest Mr. Plimpton's powers of premonition seem supernatural, it may
be well to reveal the comparative simplicity of his methods. Genius,
analyzed, is often disappointing, Mr. Plimpton's was selective and
synthetic. To illustrate in a particular case, he had met Mr. Parr
in New York and had learned that the Reverend Mr. Hodder had not only
declined to accompany the banker on a yachting trip, but had elected to
remain in the city all summer, in his rooms in the parish house, while
conducting no services. Mr. Parr had thought this peculiar. On his
return home Mr. Plimpton had one day dropped in to see a Mr. Gaines,
the real estate agent for some of his property. And Mr. Plimpton being
hale-fellow-well-met, Mr. Gaines had warned him jestingly that he
would better not let his parson know that he owned a half interest in a
certain hotel in Dalton Street, which was leased at a profitable rate.
If Mr. Plimpton felt any uneasiness, he did not betray it. And he
managed to elicit from the agent, in an entirely casual and jovial
manner, the fact that Mr. Hodder, a month or so before, had settled
the rent of a woman for a Dalton Street flat, and had been curious to
discover the name of the owner. Mr. Gaines, whose business it was to
recognize everybody, was sure of Mr. Hodder, although he had not worn
clerical clothes.
Mr. Plimpton became very thoughtful when he had left the office. He
visited Nelson Langmaid in the Parr Building. And the result of the
conference was to cause Mr. Langmaid to recall, with a twinge of
uneasiness, a certain autumn morning in a room beside Bremerton Lake
when he had been faintly yet distinctly conscious of the admonitory
whisperings of that sixth sense which had saved him on other occasions.
“Dash it!” he said to himself, after Mr. Plimpton had departed, and
he stood in the window and gazed across at the flag on the roof of
'Ferguson's.' “It would serve me right for meddling in this parson
business. Why did I take him away from Jerry Whitely, anyhow?”
It added to Nelson Langmaid's discomfort that he had a genuine
affection, even an admiration for the parson in question. He might have
known by looking at the man that he would wake up some day,--such was
the burden of his lament. And there came to him, ironically out of
the past, the very words of Mr. Parr's speech to the vestry after Dr.
Gilman's death, that succinct list of qualifications for a new rector
which he himself, Nelson Langmaid, had humorously and even more
succinctly epitomized. Their “responsibility to the parish, to the city,
and to God” had been to find a rector “neither too old nor too young,
who would preach the faith as we received it, who was not sensational,
and who did not mistake Socialism for Christianity.” At the “Socialism”
a certain sickly feeling possessed the lawyer, and he wiped beads of
perspiration from his dome-like forehead.
He didn't pretend to be versed in theology--so he had declared--and at
the memory of these words of his the epithet “ass,” self applied, passed
his lips. “You want a parson who will stick to his last, not too high or
too low or too broad or too narrow, who has intellect without too
much initiative... and will not get the church uncomfortably full
of strangers and run you out of your pews.” Thus he had capped the
financier. Well, if they had caught a tartar, it served him, Nelson
Langmaid, right. He recalled his talk with Gerald Whitely, and how his
brother-in-law had lost his temper when they had got on the subject of
personality....
Perhaps Wallis Plimpton could do something. Langmaid's hopes of this
were not high. It may have been that he had suspicions of what Mr.
Plimpton would have called Hodder's “reasonableness.” One thing was
clear--that Mr. Plimpton was frightened. In the sanctuaries, the private
confessionals of high finance (and Nelson Langmaid's office may be
called so), the more primitive emotions are sometimes exhibited.
“I don't see what business it is of a clergyman, or of any one else,
whether I own property in Dalton Street,” Mr. Plimpton had said, as he
sat on the edge of the lawyer's polished mahogany desk. “What does he
expect us to do,--allow our real estate to remain unproductive merely
for sentimental reasons? That's like a parson, most of 'em haven't got
any more common sense than that. What right has he got to go nosing
around Dalton Street? Why doesn't he stick to his church?”
“I thought you fellows were to build him a settlement house there,”
Langmaid observed.
“On the condition that he wouldn't turn socialist.”
“You'd better have stipulated it in the bond,” said the lawyer, who
could not refrain, even at this solemn moment, from the temptation of
playing upon Mr. Plimpton's apprehensions. “I'm afraid he'll make it his
business, Wallis, to find out whether you own anything in Dalton Street.
I'll bet he's got a list of Dalton Street property in his pocket right
now.”
Mr. Plimpton groaned.
“Thank God I don't own any of it!” said Langmaid.
“What the deuce does he intend to do?” the other demanded.
“Read it out in church,” Langmaid suggested. “It wouldn't sound pretty,
Wallis, to be advertised in the post on Monday morning as owning that
kind of a hotel.”
“Oh, he's a gentleman,” said Mr. Plimpton, “he wouldn't do anything as
low as that!”
“But if he's become a socialist?” objected Langmaid.
“He wouldn't do it,” his friend reiterated, none too confidently. “I
shouldn't be surprised if he made me resign from the vestry and forced
me to sell my interest. It nets me five thousand a year.”
“What is the place?” Langmaid asked sympathetically, “Harrod's?”
Mr. Plimpton nodded.
“Not that I am a patron,” the lawyer explained somewhat hastily. “But
I've seen the building, going home.”
“It looks to me as if it would burn down some day, Wallis.”
“I wish it would,” said Mr. Plimpton.
“If it's any comfort to you--to us,” Langmaid went on, after a moment,
“Eldon Parr owns the whole block above Thirteenth, on the south
side--bought it three years ago. He thinks the business section will
grow that way.”
“I know,” said Mr. Plimpton, and they looked at each other.
The name predominant in both minds had been mentioned.
“I wonder if Hodder really knows what he's up against.” Mr. Plimpton
sometimes took refuge in slang.
“Well, after all, we're not sure yet that he's 'up against anything,'”
replied Langmaid, who thought the time had come for comfort. “It may
all be a false alarm. There's no reason, after all, why a Christian
clergyman shouldn't rescue women in Dalton Street, and remain in the
city to study the conditions of the neighbourhood where his settlement
house is to be. And just, because you or I would not be able to resist
an invitation to go yachting with Eldon Parr, a man might be imagined
who had that amount of moral courage.”
“That's just it. Hodder seems to me, now I come to think of it, just
the kind of John Brown type who wouldn't hesitate to get into a row
with Eldon Parr if he thought it was right, and pull down any amount of
disagreeable stuff about our ears.”
“You're mixing your heroes, Wallis,” said Langmaid.
“I can't help it. You'd catch it, too, Nelson. What in the name of sense
possessed you to get such a man?”
This being a question the lawyer was unable to answer, the conversation
came to another pause. And it was then that Mr. Plimpton's natural
optimism reasserted itself.
“It isn't done,--the thing we're afraid of, that's all,” he proclaimed,
after a turn or two about the room. “Hodder's a gentleman, as I said,
and if he feels as we suspect he does he'll resign like a gentleman and
a Christian. I'll have a talk with him--oh, you can trust me! I've got
an idea. Gordon Atterbury told me the other day there is a vacancy in a
missionary diocese out west, and that Hodder's name had been mentioned,
among others, to the bishops for the place. He'd make a rattling
missionary bishop, you know, holding services in saloons and knocking
men's heads together for profanity, and he boxes like a professional.
Now, a word from Eldon Parr might turn the trick. Every parson wants to
be a bishop.”
Langmaid shook his head.
“You're getting out of your depths, my friend. The Church isn't
Wall Street. And missionary bishops aren't chosen to make convenient
vacancies.”
“I don't mean anything crude,” Mr. Plimpton protested. “But a word
from the chief layman of a diocese like this, a man who never misses
a General Convention, and does everything handsomely, might
count,--particularly if they're already thinking of Hodder. The bishops
would never suspect we wanted to get rid of him.”
“Well,” said Langmaid, “I advise you to go easy, all along the line.”
“Oh, I'll go easy enough,” Mr. Plimpton assented, smiling. “Do you
remember how I pulled off old Senator Matthews when everybody swore he
was dead set on voting for an investigation in the matter of those coal
lands Mr. Parr got hold of in his state?”
“Matthews isn't Hodder, by a long shat,” said Langmaid. “If you ask me
my opinion, I'll tell you frankly that if Hodder has made up his mind
to stay in St. John's a ton of dynamite and all the Eldon Parrs in the
nation can't get him out.”
“Can't the vestry make him resign?” asked Mr. Plimpton, uncomfortably.
“You'd better, go home and study your canons, my friend. Nothing short
of conviction for heresy can do it, if he doesn't want to go.”
“You wouldn't exactly call him a heretic,” Mr. Plimpton said ruefully.
“Would you know a heretic if you saw one?” demanded Langmaid.
“No, but my wife would, and Gordon Atterbury and Constable would, and
Eldon Parr. But don't let's get nervous.”
“Well, that's sensible at any rate,” said Langmaid....
So Mr. Plimpton had gone off optimistic, and felt even more so the next
morning after he had had his breakfast in the pleasant dining room of
the Gore Mansion, of which he was now master. As he looked out through
the open window at the sunshine in the foliage of Waverley Place,
the prospect of his being removed from that position of dignity and
influence on the vestry of St. John's, which he had achieved, with
others, after so much walking around the walls, seemed remote. And he
reflected with satisfaction upon the fact that his wife, who was his
prime minister, would be home from the East that day. Two heads were
better than one, especially if one of the two were Charlotte Gore's.
And Mr. Plimpton had often reflected upon the loss to the world, and the
gain to himself, that she was a woman.
It would not be gallant to suggest that his swans were geese.
IV
The successful navigation of lower Tower Street, at noonday, required
presence of mind on the part of the pedestrian. There were currents and
counter-currents, eddies and backwaters, and at the corner of Vine a
veritable maelstrom through which two lines of electric cars pushed
their way, east and weft, north and south, with incessant clanging
of bells; followed by automobiles with resounding horns, trucks and
delivery wagons with wheels reverberating on the granite. A giant Irish
policeman, who seemed in continual danger of a violent death, and wholly
indifferent to it, stood between the car tracks and halted the rush from
time to time, driving the people like sheep from one side to the other.
Through the doors of Ferguson's poured two conflicting streams of
humanity, and wistful groups of young women, on the way from hasty
lunches, blocked the pavements and stared at the finery behind the
plate-glass windows.
The rector, slowly making his way westward, permitted himself to be
thrust hither and thither, halted and shoved on again as he studied the
faces of the throng. And presently he found himself pocketed before one
of the exhibits of feminine interest, momentarily helpless, listening
to the admiring and envious chorus of a bevy of diminutive shop-girls
on the merits of a Paris gown. It was at this moment that he perceived,
pushing towards him with an air of rescue, the figure of his vestryman,
Mr. Wallis Plimpton.
“Well, well, well!” he cried, as he seized Hodder by the arm and pulled
him towards the curb. “What are you doing herein the marts of trade?
Come right along with me to the Eyrie, and we'll have something, to
eat.”
The Eyrie was a famous lunch club, of limited membership, at the top of
the Parr Building, where financial affairs of the first importance were
discussed and settled.
Hodder explained that he had lunched at half-past twelve.
“Well, step into my office a minute. It does me good, to see you again,
upon my word, and I can't let you get by without a little pow-wow.”
Mr. Plimpton's trust company, in Vine Street, resembled a Greek temple.
Massive but graceful granite columns adorned its front, while within it
was partitioned off with polished marble and ornamental grills. In the
rear, guarded by the desks and flanked by the compartments of various
subordinates, was the president's private sanctum, and into this holy of
holies Mr. Plimpton led the way with the simple, unassuming genial air
of the high priest of modern finance who understands men. The room
was eloquent almost to affectation of the system and order of great
business, inasmuch as it betrayed not the least sign of a workshop. On
the dark oak desk were two leather-bound books and a polished telephone.
The walls were panelled, there was a stone fireplace with andirons
set, a deep carpet spread over the tessellated floor, and three
leather-padded armchairs, one of which Mr. Plimpton hospitably drew
forward for the rector. He then produced a box of cigars.
“You don't smoke, Mr. Hodder. I always forget. That's the way you manage
to keep yourself in such good shape.” He drew out a gold match box and
seated himself with an air of gusto opposite his guest. “And you haven't
had a vacation, they tell me.”
“On the contrary,” said the rector, “McCrae has taken the services all
summer.”
“But you've been in the city!” Mr. Plimpton exclaimed, puffing at his
cigar.
“Yes, I've been in the city.”
“Well, well, I'll bet you haven't been idle. Just between us, as
friends, Mr. Hodder, I've often wondered if you didn't work too
hard--there's such a thing as being too conscientious, you know.
And I've an idea that the rest of the vestry think so. Mr. Parr, for
instance. We know when we've got a good thing, and we don't want to wear
you out. Oh, we can appreciate your point of view, and admire it. But a
little relaxation--eh? It's too bad that you couldn't have seen your way
to take that cruise--Mr. Parr was all cut up about it. I guess you're
the only man among all of us fairly close to him, who really knows him
well,” said Mr. Plimpton, admiringly. “He thinks a great deal of you,
Mr. Hodder. By the way, have you seen him since he got back?”
“No,” Hodder answered.
“The trip did him good. I thought he was a little seedy in the
spring--didn't you? Wonderful man! And when I think how he's slandered
and abused it makes me hot. And he never says anything, never
complains, lives up there all alone, and takes his medicine. That's
real patriotism, according to my view. He could retire to-morrow--but
he keeps on--why? Because he feels the weight of a tremendous
responsibility on his shoulders, because he knows if it weren't for him
and men like him upon whom the prosperity of this nation depends, we'd
have famine and anarchy on our hands in no time. And look what he's
done for the city, without ostentation, mind you! He never blows his own
horn-never makes a speech. And for the Church! But I needn't tell you.
When this settlement house and chapel are finished, they'll be coming
out here from New York to get points. By the way, I meant to have
written you. Have our revised plans come yet? We ought to break ground
in November, oughtn't we?”
“I intend to lay my views on that matter before the vestry at the next
meeting, the rector said.
“Well,” declared Mr. Plimpton, after a scarcely perceptible pause, “I've
no doubt they'll be worth listening to. If I were to make a guess,” he
continued, with a contemplative smile, blowing a thin stream of smoke
towards the distant ceiling, “I should bet that you have spent your
summer looking over the ground. I don't say that you have missed your
vocation, Mr. Hodder, but I don't mind telling you that for a clergyman,
for a man absorbed in spiritual matters, a man who can preach
the sermons you preach, you've got more common-sense and business
thoroughness than any one I have ever run across in your profession.”
“Looking over the ground?” Hodder repeated, ignoring the compliment.
“Sure,” said Mr. Plimpton, smiling more benignly than ever. “You mustn't
be modest about it. Dalton Street. And when that settlement house is
built, I'll guarantee it will be run on a business basis. No nonsense.”
“What do you mean by nonsense?” Hodder asked. He did not make the
question abrupt, and there was even the hint of a smile in his eyes,
which Mr. Plimpton found the more disquieting.
“Why, that's only a form of speech. I mean you'll be practical,
efficient, that you'll get hold of the people of that neighbourhood and
make 'em see that the world isn't such a bad place after all, make 'em
realize that we in St. John's want to help 'em out. That you won't
make them more foolishly discontented than they are, and go preaching
socialism to them.”
“I have no intention of preaching socialism,” said Hodder. But he laid a
slight emphasis on the word which sent a cold shiver down Mr. Plimpton's
spine, and made him wonder whether there might not be something worse
than socialism.
“I knew you wouldn't,” he declared, with all the heartiness he could
throw into his voice. “I repeat, you're a practical, sensible man.
I'll yield to none in my belief in the Church as a moral, uplifting,
necessary spiritual force in our civilization, in my recognition of her
high ideals, but we business men, Mr. Hodder,--as--I am sure you must
agree,--have got to live, I am sorry to say, on a lower plane. We've
got to deal with the world as we find it, and do our little best to help
things along. We can't take the Gospel literally, or we should all be
ruined in a day, and swamp everybody else. You understand me?
“I understand you,” said the rector.
Mr. Plimpton's cigar had gone out. In spite of himself, he had slipped
from the easy-going, casual tone into one that was becoming persuasive,
apologetic, strenuous. Although the day was not particularly warm, he
began to perspire a little; and he repeated the words over to himself,
“I understand you.” What the deuce did the rector know? He had somehow
the air of knowing everything--more than Mr. Plimpton did. And Mr.
Plimpton was beginning to have the unusual and most disagreeable feeling
of having been weighed in the balance and found wanting. He glanced at
his guest, who sat quite still, the head bent a trifle, the disturbing
gray eyes fixed contemplatively an him--accusingly. And yet the
accusation did not seem personal with the clergyman, whose eyes were
nearly the medium, the channels of a greater, an impersonal Ice. It was
true that the man had changed. He was wholly baffling to Mr. Plimpton,
whose sense of alarm increased momentarily into an almost panicky
feeling as he remembered what Langmaid had said. Was this inscrutable
rector of St. John's gazing, knowingly, at the half owner of Harrods
Hotel in Dalton Street, who couldn't take the Gospel literally?
There was evidently no way to find out at once, and suspense would be
unbearable, in vain he told himself that these thoughts were nonsense,
the discomfort persisted, and he had visions of that career in which
he had become one of the first citizens and the respected husband of
Charlotte Gore clashing down about his ears. Why? Because a clergyman
should choose to be quixotic, fanatical? He did not took quixotic,
fanatical, Mr. Plimpton had to admit,--but a good deal saner than he,
Mr. Plimpton, must have appeared at that moment. His throat was dry, and
he didn't dare to make the attempt to relight his cigar.
“There's nothing like getting together--keeping in touch with people,
Mr. Hodder,” he managed to say. “I've been out of town a good deal this
summer--putting on a little flesh, I'm sorry to admit. But I've been
meaning to drop into the parish house and talk over those revised plans
with you. I will drop in--in a day or two. I'm interested in the work,
intensely interested, and so is Mrs. Plimpton. She'll help you. I'm
sorry you can't lunch with me.”
He had the air, now, of the man who finds himself disagreeably and
unexpectedly closeted with a lunatic; and his language, although he
sought to control it, became even a trifle less coherent.
“You must make allowances for us business men, Mr. Hodder. I mean, of
course, we're sometimes a little lax in our duties--in the summer, that
is. Don't shoot the pianist, he's doing his--ahem! You know the story.
“By the way, I hear great things of you; I'm told it's on the cards that
you're to be made a bishop.”
“Oh,” answered the rector, “there are better men mentioned than I!”
“I want you to know this,” said his vestryman, as he seized Hodder's
hand, “much as we value you here, bitterly as we should hate to lose
you, none of us, I am sure, would stand in the way of such a deserved
advancement.”
“Thank you, Mr. Plimpton,” said the rector.
Mr. Plimpton watched the vigorous form striding through the great
chamber until it disappeared. Then he seized his hat and made his way
as rapidly as possible through the crowds to the Parr Building. At the
entrance of the open-air roof garden of the Eyrie he ran into Nelson
Langmaid.
“You're the very man I'm after,” said Mr. Plimpton, breathlessly. “I
stopped in your office, and they said you'd gone up.”
“What's the matter, Wallis?” inquired the lawyer, tranquilly. “You look
as if you'd lost a couple of bonds.”
“I've just seen Hodder, and he is going to do it.”
“Do what?”
“Sit down here, at this table in the corner, and I'll tell you.”
For a practical man, it must be admitted that Mr. Plimpton had very
little of the concrete to relate. And it appeared on cross-examination
by Mr. Langmaid, who ate his cold meat and salad with an exasperating
and undiminished appetite--that the only definite thing the rector had
said was that he didn't intend to preach socialism. This was reassuring.
“Reassuring!” exclaimed Mr. Plimpton, whose customary noonday hunger was
lacking, “I wish you could have heard him say it!”
“The wicked,” remarked the lawyer, “flee when no man pursueth. Don't
shoot the pianist!” Langmaid set down his beer, and threw back his
head and laughed. “If I were the Reverend Mr. Hodder, after such an
exhibition as you gave, I should immediately have suspected the pianist
of something, and I should have gone off by myself and racked my brains
and tried to discover what it was. He's a clever man, and if he hasn't
got a list of Dalton Street property now he'll have one by to-morrow,
and the story of some of your transactions with Tom Beatty and the City
Council.”
“I believe you'd joke in the electric chair,” said Mr. a Plimpton,
resentfully. “I'll tell you this,--and my experience backs me up,--if
you can't get next to a man by a little plain talk, he isn't safe. I
haven't got the market sense for nothing, and I'll give you this tip,
Nelson,--it's time to stand from under. Didn't I warn you fellows that
Bedloe Hubbell meant business long before he started in? and this parson
can give Hubbell cards and spades. Hodder can't see this thing as it
is. He's been thinking, this summer. And a man of that kind is downright
dangerous when he begins to think. He's found out things, and he's put
two and two together, and he's the uncompromising type. He has a notion
that the Gospel can be taken literally, and I could feel all the time I
was talking to him he thought I was a crook.”
“Perhaps he was right,” observed the lawyer.
“That comes well from you,” Mr. Plimpton retorted.
“Oh, I'm a crook, too,” said Langmaid. “I discovered it some time ago.
The difference between you and me, Wallis, is that I am willing to
acknowledge it, and you're not. The whole business world, as we know
it, is crooked, and if we don't cut other people's throats, they'll cut
ours.”
“And if we let go, what would happen to the country?” his companion
demanded.
Langmaid began to shake with silent laughter.
“Your solicitude about the country, Wallis, is touching. I was brought
up to believe that patriotism had an element of sacrifice in it, but
I can't see ours. And I can't imagine myself, somehow, as a Hercules
bearing the burden of our Constitution. From Mr. Hodder's point of view,
perhaps,--and I'm not sure it isn't the right one, the pianist is doing
his damnedest, to the tune of--Dalton Street. We might as well look this
thing in the face, my friend. You and I really don't believe in another
world, or we shouldn't be taking so much trouble to make this one as
we'd like to have it.”
“I never expected to hear you talk this way,” said Mr. Plimpton.
“Well, it's somewhat of a surprise to me,” the lawyer admitted.
“And I don't think you put it fairly,” his friend contended. “I never
can tell when you are serious, but this is damned serious. In business
we have to deal with crooks, who hold us up right and left, and if we
stood back you know as well as I do that everything would go to pot. And
if we let the reformers have their way the country would be bedlam. We'd
have anarchy and bloodshed, revolution, and the people would be calling
us, the strong men, back in no time. You can't change human nature.
And we have a sense of responsibility--we support law and order and the
Church, and found institutions, and give millions away in charity.”
The big lawyer listened to this somewhat fervent defence of his order
with an amused smile, nodding his head slightly from side to side.
“If you don't believe in it,” demanded Mr. Plimpton, “why the deuce don't
you drop it?”
“It's because of my loyalty,” said Langmaid. “I wouldn't desert my pals.
I couldn't bear, Wallis, to see you go to the guillotine without me.”
Mr. Plimpton became unpleasantly silent.
“Well, you may think it's a joke,” he resumed, after a moment, “but
there will be a guillotine if we don't look out. That confounded parson
is getting ready to spring something, and I'm going to give Mr. Parr a
tip. He'll know how to handle him. He doesn't talk much, but I've got an
idea, from one or two things he let drop, that he's a little suspicious
of a change in Hodder. But he ought to be waived.”
“You're in no condition to talk to Mr. Parr, or to anyone else, except
your wife, Walks,” Langmaid said. “You'd better go home, and let me see
Mr. Parr. I'm responsible for Mr. Hodder, anyway.”
“All right,” Mr. Plimpton agreed, as though he had gained some shred of
comfort from this thought. “I guess you're in worse than any of us.”
Volume 6.