Book: The Inside of the Cup, Volume 1
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Winston Churchill >> The Inside of the Cup, Volume 1
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.
CHAPTER III
THE PRIMROSE PATH
I
Nelson Langmaid's extraordinary judgment appeared once more to be
vindicated.
There had been, indeed, a critical, anxious moment, emphasized by the
agitation of bright feminine plumes and the shifting of masculine backs
into the corners of the pews. None got so far as to define to themselves
why there should be an apparent incompatibility between ruggedness and
orthodoxy--but there were some who hoped and more who feared. Luther had
been orthodox once, Savonarola also: in appearance neither was more
canonical than the new rector.
His congregation, for the most part, were not analytical. But they felt
a certain anomaly in virility proclaiming tradition. It took them
several Sundays to get accustomed to it.
To those who had been used for more than a quarter of a century to seeing
old Dr. Gilman's gentle face under the familiar and faded dove of the
sounding-board, to the deliberation of his walk, and the hesitation of
his manner, the first impression of the Reverend John Hodder was somewhat
startling. They felt that there should be a leisurely element in
religion. He moved across the chancel with incredible swiftness, his
white surplice flowing like the draperies of a moving Victory, wasted
no time with the pulpit lights, announced his text in a strong and
penetrating, but by no means unpleasing voice, and began to speak with
the certainty of authority.
Here, in an age when a new rector had, ceased to be an all-absorbing
topic in social life, was a new and somewhat exhilarating experience.
And it may be privately confessed that there were some who sat in St.
John's during those first weeks of his incumbency who would indignantly
have repudiated the accusation that they were not good churchmen and
churchwomen, and who nevertheless had queer sensations in listening to
ancient doctrines set forth with Emersonian conviction. Some were
courageous enough to ask themselves, in the light of this forceful
presentation, whether they really did believe them as firmly as they
supposed they had.
Dear old Dr. Gilman had been milder--much milder as the years gained upon
him. And latterly, when he had preached, his voice had sounded like the
unavailing protest of one left far behind, who called out faintly with
unheeded warnings. They had loved him: but the modern world was a busy
world, and Dr. Gilman did not understand it. This man was different.
Here was what the Church taught, he said, and they might slight it at
their peril!
It is one thing to believe one's self orthodox, and quite another to have
that orthodoxy so definitely defined as to be compelled, whether or no,
to look it squarely in the face and own or disown it. Some indeed, like
Gordon Atterbury, stood the test; responded to the clarion call for which
they had been longing. But little Everett Constable, who also sat on the
vestry, was a trifle uncomfortable in being reminded that absence from
the Communion Table was perilous, although he would have been the last to
deny the efficacy of the Sacrament.
The new rector was plainly not a man who might be accused of policy in
pandering to the tastes of a wealthy and conservative flock. But if,
in the series of sermons which lasted from his advent until well after
Christmas, he had deliberately consulted their prejudices, he could not
have done better. It is true that he went beyond the majority of them,
but into a region which they regarded as preeminently safe,--a region the
soil of which was traditional. To wit: St. Paul had left to the world
a consistent theology. Historical research was ignored rather than
condemned. And it might reasonably have been gathered from these
discourses that the main proofs of Christ's divinity lay in his Virgin
Birth, his miracles, and in the fact that his body had risen from the
grave, had been seen by many, and even touched. Hence unbelief had no
excuse. By divine commission there were bishops, priests, and deacons in
the new hierarchy, and it was through the Apostolic Succession that he,
their rector, derived his sacerdotal powers. There were, no doubt,
many obscure passages in the Scripture, but men's minds were finite;
a catholic acceptance was imperative, and the evils of the present day
--a sufficiently sweeping statement--were wholly due to deplorable lapses
from such acceptance. The Apostolic teaching must be preserved, since it
transcended all modern wanderings after truth. Hell, though not
definitely defined in terms of flames, was no less a state of torture
(future, by implication) of which fire was but a faint symbol. And
he gave them clearly to understand that an unbaptized person ran no
inconsiderable risk. He did not declare unqualifiedly that the Church
alone had the power to save, but such was the inference.
II
It was entirely fitting, no doubt, when the felicitations of certain of
the older parishioners on his initial sermon were over, that Mr. Hodder
should be carried westward to lunch with the first layman of the diocese.
But Mr. Parr, as became a person of his responsibility, had been more
moderate in his comment. For he had seen, in his day, many men whose
promise had been unfulfilled. Tightly buttoned, silk hatted, upright,
he sat in the corner of his limousine, the tasselled speaking-tube in
his hand, from time to time cautioning his chauffeur.
"Carefully!" he cried. "I've told you not to drive so fast in this part
of town. I've never got used to automobiles," he remarked to Hodder,
"and I formerly went to church in the street-cars, but the distances
have grown so great--and I have occasionally been annoyed in them."
Hodder was not given to trite acquiescence. His homely composure belied
the alertness of his faculties; he was striving to adapt himself to the
sudden broadening and quickening of the stream of his life, and he felt a
certain excitement--although he did not betray it--in the presence of the
financier. Much as he resented the thought, it was impossible for him
not to realize that the man's pleasure and displeasure were important;
for, since his arrival, he had had delicate reminders of this from many
sources. Recurrently, it had caused him a vague uneasiness, hinted at a
problem new to him. He was jealous of the dignity of the Church, and he
seemed already to have detected in Mr. Parr's manner a subtle note of
patronage. Nor could Hodder's years of provincialism permit him to
forget that this man with whom he was about to enter into personal
relations was a capitalist of national importance.
The neighbourhood they traversed was characteristic of our rapidly
expanding American cities. There were rows of dwelling houses, once
ultra-respectable, now slatternly, and lawns gone grey; some of these
houses had been remodelled into third-rate shops, or thrown together to
make manufacturing establishments: saloons occupied all the favourable
corners. Flaming posters on vacant lots announced, pictorially, dubious
attractions at the theatres. It was a wonderful Indian summer day, the
sunlight soft and melting; and the smoke which continually harassed this
district had lifted a little, as though in deference to the Sabbath.
Hodder read the sign on a lamp post, Dalton Street. The name clung in
his memory.
"We thought, some twenty years ago, of moving the church westward," said
Mr. Parr, "but finally agreed to remain where we were."
The rector had a conviction on this point, and did not hesitate to state
it without waiting to be enlightened as to the banker's views.
"It would seem to me a wise decision," he said, looking out of the
window, and wholly absorbed in the contemplation of the evidences of
misery and vice, "with this poverty at the very doors of the church."
Something in his voice impelled Eldon Parr to shoot a glance at his
profile.
"Poverty is inevitable, Mr. Hodder," he declared. "The weak always
sink."
Hodder's reply, whatever it might have been, was prevented by the sudden
and unceremonious flight of both occupants toward the ceiling of the
limousine, caused by a deep pit in the asphalt.
"What are you doing, Gratton?" Mr. Parr called sharply through the tube.
Presently, the lawns began to grow brighter, the houses more cheerful,
and the shops were left behind. They crossed the third great transverse
artery of the city (not so long ago, Mr. Parr remarked, a quagmire), now
lined by hotels and stores with alluring displays in plate glass windows
and entered a wide boulevard that stretched westward straight to the
great Park. This boulevard the financier recalled as a country road of
clay. It was bordered by a vivid strip, of green; a row of tall and
graceful lamp posts, like sentinels, marked its course; while the
dwellings, set far back on either side, were for the most part large and
pretentious, betraying in their many tentative styles of architecture the
reaching out of a commercial nation after beauty. Some, indeed, were
simple of line and restful to the trained eye.
They came to the wide entrance of the Park, so wisely preserved as a
breathing place for future generations. A slight haze had gathered over
the rolling forests to the westward; but this haze was not smoke. Here,
in this enchanting region, the autumn sunlight was undiluted gold, the
lawns, emerald, and the red gravel around the statesman's statue
glistening. The automobile quickly swung into a street that skirted the
Park,--if street it might be called, for it was more like a generous
private driveway,--flanked on the right by fences of ornamental ironwork
and high shrubbery that concealed the fore yards of dominating private
residences which might: without great exaggeration, have been called
palaces.
"That's Ferguson's house," volunteered Mr. Parr, indicating a marble
edifice with countless windows. "He's one of your vestrymen, you know.
Ferguson's Department Store." The banker's eyes twinkled a little for
the first time. "You'll probably find it convenient. Most people do.
Clever business man, Ferguson."
But the rector was finding difficulty in tabulating his impressions.
They turned in between two posts of a gateway toward a huge house of
rough granite. And Hodder wondered whether, in the swift onward roll
of things, the time would come when this, too, would have been deemed
ephemeral. With its massive walls and heavy, red-tiled roof that sloped
steeply to many points, it seemed firmly planted for ages to come. It
was surrounded, yet not hemmed in, by trees of a considerable age. His
host explained that these had belonged to the original farm of which all
this Park Street property had made a part.
They alighted under a porte-cochere with a glass roof.
"I'm sorry," said Mr. Parr, as the doors swung open and he led the way
into the house, "I'm sorry I can't give you a more cheerful welcome, but
my son and daughter, for their own reasons, see fit to live elsewhere."
Hodder's quick ear detected in the tone another cadence, and he glanced
at Eldon Parr with a new interest . . . .
Presently they stood, face to face, across a table reduced to its
smallest proportions, in the tempered light of a vast dining-room,
an apartment that seemed to symbolize the fortress-like properties of
wealth. The odd thought struck the clergyman that this man had made his
own Tower of London, had built with his own hands the prison in which he
was to end his days. The carved oaken ceiling, lofty though it was, had
the effect of pressing downward, the heavy furniture matched the heavy
walls, and even the silent, quick-moving servants had a watchful air.
Mr. Parr bowed his head while Hodder asked grace. They sat down.
The constraint which had characterized their conversation continued,
yet there was a subtle change in the attitude of the clergyman. The
financier felt this, though it could not be said that Hodder appeared
more at his ease: his previous silences had been by no means awkward.
Eldon Parr liked self-contained men. But his perceptions were as keen as
Nelson Langmaid's, and like Langmaid, he had gradually become conscious
of a certain baffling personality in the new rector of St. John's. From
time to time he was aware of the grey-green eyes curiously fixed on him,
and at a loss to account for their expression. He had no thought of
reading in it an element of pity. Yet pity was nevertheless in the
rector's heart, and its advent was emancipating him from the limitations
of provincial inexperience.
Suddenly, the financier launched forth on a series of shrewd and
searching questions about Bremerton, its church, its people, its
industries, and social conditions. All of which Hodder answered to his
apparent satisfaction.
Coffee was brought. Hodder pushed back his chair, crossed his knees,
and sat perfectly still regarding his host, his body suggesting a repose
that did not interfere with his perceptive faculties.
"You don't smoke, Mr. Hodder?"
The rector smiled and shook his head. Mr. Parr selected a diminutive,
yellow cigar and held it up.
"This," he said, "has been the extent of my indulgence for twenty years.
They are made for me in Cuba."
Hodder smiled again, but said nothing.
"I have had a letter from your former bishop, speaking of you in the
highest terms," he observed.
"The bishop is very kind."
Mr. Parr cleared his throat.
"I am considerably older than you," he went on, "and I have the future of
St. John's very much at heart, Mr. Hodder. I trust you will remember
this and make allowances for it as I talk to you.
"I need not remind you that you have a grave responsibility on your
shoulders for so young a man, and that St. John's is the oldest parish
in the diocese."
"I think I realize it, Mr. Parr," said Hodder, gravely. "It was only the
opportunity of a larger work here that induced me to leave Bremerton."
"Exactly," agreed the banker. "The parish, I believe, is in good running
order--I do not think you will see the necessity for many--ahem--changes.
But we sadly needed an executive head. And, if I may say so, Mr. Hodder,
you strike me as a man of that type, who might have made a success in a
business career."
The rector smiled again.
"I am sure you could pay me no higher compliment," he answered.
For an instant Eldon Parr, as he stared at the clergyman, tightened his
lips,--lips that seemed peculiarly formed for compression. Then they
relaxed into what resembled a smile. If it were one, the other returned
it.
"Seriously," Mr. Parr declared, "it does me good in these days to hear,
from a young man, such sound doctrine as you preach. I am not one of
those who believe in making concessions to agnostics and atheists. You
were entirely right, in my opinion, when you said that we who belong to
the Church--and of course you meant all orthodox Christians--should stand
by our faith as delivered by the saints. Of course," he added, smiling,
"I should not insist upon the sublapsarian view of election which I was
taught in the Presbyterian Church as a boy."
Hodder laughed, but did not interrupt.
"On the other hand," Mr. Parr continued, "I have little patience with
clergymen who would make religion attractive. What does it amount to
--luring people into the churches on one pretext or another, sugar-coating
the pill? Salvation is a more serious matter. Let the churches stick
to their own. We have at St. John's a God-fearing, conservative
congregation, which does not believe in taking liberties with sound and
established doctrine. And I may confess to you, Mr. Hodder, that we were
naturally not a little anxious about Dr. Gilman's successor, that we
should not get, in spite of every precaution, a man tinged with the new
and dangerous ideas so prevalent, I regret to say, among the clergy.
I need scarcely add that our anxieties have been set at rest."
"That," said Hodder, "must be taken as a compliment to the dean of the
theological seminary from which I graduated."
The financier stared again. But he decided that Mr. Hodder had not meant
to imply that he, Mr. Parr, was attempting to supersede the dean. The
answer had been modest.
"I take it for granted that you and I and all sensible men are happily.
agreed that the Church should remain where she is. Let the people come
to her. She should be, if I may so express it, the sheet anchor of
society, our bulwark against socialism, in spite of socialists who call
themselves ministers of God. The Church has lost ground--why? Because
she has given ground. The sanctity of private property is being menaced,
demagogues are crying out from the house-tops and inciting people against
the men who have made this country what it is, who have risked their
fortunes and their careers for the present prosperity. We have no longer
any right, it seems, to employ whom we will in our factories and our
railroads; we are not allowed to regulate our rates, although the risks
were all ours. Even the women are meddling,--they are not satisfied to
stay in the homes, where they belong. You agree with me?"