Book: The Inside of the Cup, Volume 1
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Winston Churchill >> The Inside of the Cup, Volume 1
"And Mr. Parr," remarked the modern Evelyn, sententiously, "pays the
bills, at St. John's. Doesn't he, father?"
"I fear he pays a large proportion of them," Mr. Waring admitted, in a
serious tone.
"In these days," said Evelyn, "the man who pays the bills is entitled to
have his religion as he likes it."
"No matter how he got the money to pay them," added Phil.
"That suggests another little hitch in the modern church which will have
to be straightened out," said George Bridges.
"'Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye make clean the
outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of
extortion and excess.'"
"Why, George, you of all people quoting the Bible!" Eleanor exclaimed.
"And quoting it aptly, too," said Phil Goodrich.
"I'm afraid if we began on the scribes and Pharisees, we shouldn't stop
with Mr. Parr," Asa Wiring observed, with a touch of sadness.
"In spite of all they say he has done, I can't help feeling sorry for
him," said Mrs. Waring. "He must be so lonely in that huge palace of
his beside the Park, his wife dead, and Preston running wild around the
world, and Alison no comfort. The idea of a girl leaving her father
as she did and going off to New York to become a landscape architect!"
"But, mother," Evelyn pleaded, "I can't see why a woman shouldn't lead
her own life. She only has one, like a man. And generally she doesn't
get that."
Mrs. Waring rose.
"I don't know what we're coming to. I was taught that a woman's place
was with her husband and children; or, if she had none, with her family.
I tried to teach you so, my dear."
"Well," said Evelyn, "I'm here yet. I haven't Alison's excuse. Cheer
up, mother, the world's no worse than it was."
"I don't know about that," answered Mrs. Waring.
"Listen!" ejaculated Eleanor.
Mrs. Waring's face brightened. Sounds of mad revelry came down from the
floor above.
CHAPTER II
MR. LANGMAID'S MISSION
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!