Book: The Inside of the Cup, Volume 1
W >>
Winston Churchill >> The Inside of the Cup, Volume 1
"As to the women," said the rector, "I have to acknowledge that I have
never had any experience with the militant type of which you speak."
"I pray God you may never have," exclaimed Mr. Parr, with more feeling
than he had yet shown.
"Woman's suffrage, and what is called feminism in general, have never
penetrated to Bremerton. Indeed, I must confess to have been wholly out
of touch with the problems to which you refer, although of course I have
been aware of their existence."
"You will meet them here," said the banker, significantly.
"Yes," the rector replied thoughtfully, "I can see that. I know that
the problems here will be more complicated, more modern,--more difficult.
And I thoroughly agree with you that their ultimate solution is dependent
on Christianity. If I did not believe,--in spite of the evident fact
which you point out of the Church's lost ground, that her future will
be greater than her past, I should not be a clergyman."
The quiet but firm note of faith was, not lost on the financier, and yet
was not he quite sure what was to be made of it? He had a faint and
fleeting sense of disquiet, which registered and was gone.
"I hope so," he said vaguely, referring perhaps to the resuscitation of
which the rector spoke. He drummed on the table. "I'll go so far as to
say that I, too, think that the structure can be repaired. And I believe
it is the duty of the men of influence--all men of influence--to assist.
I don't say that men of influence are not factors in the Church to-day,
but I do say that they are not using the intelligence in this task which
they bring to bear, for instance, on their business."
"Perhaps the clergy might help," Hodder suggested, and added more
seriously, "I think that many of them are honestly trying to do so."
"No doubt of it. Why is it," Mr. Parr continued reflectively, "that
ministers as a whole are by no means the men they were? You will pardon
my frankness. When I was a boy, the minister was looked up to as an
intellectual and moral force to be reckoned with. I have heard it
assigned, as one reason, that in the last thirty years other careers have
opened up, careers that have proved much more attractive to young men of
ability."
"Business careers?" inquired the rector.
"Precisely!"
"In other words," said Hodder, with his curious smile, "the ministry
gets the men who can't succeed at anything else."
"Well, that's putting it rather strong," answered Mr. Parr, actually
reddening a little. "But come now, most young men would rather be a
railroad president than a bishop,--wouldn't they?"
"Most young men would," agreed Hodder, quickly, "but they are not the
young men who ought to be bishops, you'll admit that."
The financier, be it recorded to his credit, did not lack appreciation
of this thrust, and, for the first time, he laughed with something
resembling heartiness. This laughter, in which Hodder joined, seemed
suddenly to put them on a new footing--a little surprising to both.
"Come," said the financier, rising, "I'm sure you like pictures, and
Langmaid tells me you have a fancy for first editions. Would you care
to go to the gallery?"
"By all means," the rector assented.
Their footsteps, as they crossed the hardwood floors, echoed in the empty
house. After pausing to contemplate a Millet on the stair landing, they
came at last to the huge, silent gallery, where the soft but adequate
light fell upon many masterpieces, ancient and modern. And it was here,
while gazing at the Corots and Bonheurs, Lawrences, Romneys, Copleys, and
Halses, that Hodder's sense of their owner's isolation grew almost
overpowering Once, glancing over his shoulder at Mr. Parr, he surprised
in his eyes an expression almost of pain.
"These pictures must give you great pleasure," he said.
"Oh," replied the banker, in a queer voice, "I'm always glad when any one
appreciates them. I never come in here alone."
Hodder did not reply. They passed along to an upstairs sitting-room,
which must, Hodder thought, be directly over the dining-room. Between
its windows was a case containing priceless curios.
"My wife liked this room," Mr. Parr explained, as he opened the case.
When they had inspected it, the rector stood for a moment gazing out at
a formal garden at the back of the house. The stalks of late flowers lay
withering, but here and there the leaves were still vivid, and clusters
of crimson berries gleamed in the autumn sunshine. A pergola ran down
the middle, and through denuded grape-vines he caught a glimpse, at the
far end, of sculptured figures and curving marble benches surrounding a
pool.
"What a wonderful spot!" he exclaimed.
"My daughter Alison designed it."
"She must have great talent," said the rector.
"She's gone to New York and become a landscape architect," said his host
with a perceptible dryness. "Women in these days are apt to be
everything except what the Lord intended them to be."
They went downstairs, and Hodder took his leave, although he felt an odd
reluctance to go. Mr. Parr rang the bell.
"I'll send you down in the motor," he said.
"I'd like the exercise of walking," said the rector. "I begin to miss it
already, in the city."
"You look as if you had taken a great deal of it," Mr. Parr declared,
following him to the door. "I hope you'll drop in often. Even if I'm
not here, the gallery and the library are at your disposal."
Their eyes met.
"You're very good," Hodder replied, and went down the steps and through
the open doorway.
Lost in reflection, he walked eastward with long and rapid strides,
striving to reduce to order in his mind the impressions the visit had
given him, only to find them too complex, too complicated by unlooked-for
emotions. Before its occurrence, he had, in spite of an inherent common
sense, felt a little uneasiness over the prospective meeting with the
financier. And Nelson Langmaid had hinted, good-naturedly, that it was
his, Hodder's, business, to get on good terms with Mr. Parr--otherwise
the rectorship of St. John's might not prove abed of roses. Although the
lawyer had spoken with delicacy, he had once more misjudged his man--the
result being to put Hodder on his guard. He had been the more determined
not to cater to the banker.
The outcome of it all had been that the rector left him with a sense of
having crossed barriers forbidden to other men, and not understanding how
he had crossed them. Whether this incipient intimacy were ominous or
propitious, whether there were involved in it a germ (engendered by a
radical difference of temperament) capable of developing into future
conflict, he could not now decide. If Eldon Parr were Procrustes he,
Hodder, had fitted the bed, and to say the least, this was extraordinary,
if not a little disquieting. Now and again his thoughts reverted to the
garden, and to the woman who had made it. Why had she deserted?
At length, after he had been walking for nearly an hour, he halted and
looked about him. He was within a few blocks of the church, a little to
one side of Tower Street, the main east and west highway of the city,
in the midst of that district in which Mr. Parr had made the remark that
poverty was inevitable. Slovenly and depressing at noonday, it seemed
now frankly to have flung off its mask. Dusk was gathering, and with it
a smoke-stained fog that lent a sickly tinge to the lights. Women slunk
by him: the saloons, apparently closed, and many houses with veiled
windows betrayed secret and sinister gleams. In the midst of a block
rose a tall, pretentious though cheaply constructed building with the
words "Hotel Albert" in flaming electric letters above an archway. Once
more his eye read Dalton Street on a lamp . . . .
Hodder resumed his walk more slowly, and in a few minutes reached his
rooms in the parish house.
CHAPTER IV
SOME RIDDLES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
I
Although he found the complications of a modern city parish somewhat
bewildering, the new rector entered into his duties that winter with
apostolic zeal. He was aware of limitations and anomalies, but his faith
was boundless, his energy the subject of good-natured comment by his
vestry and parishioners, whose pressing invitations' to dinners he was
often compelled to refuse. There was in John Hodder something
indefinable that inflamed curiosity and left it unsatisfied.
His excuse for attending these dinners, which indeed were relaxing and
enjoyable, he found in the obvious duty of getting to know the most
important members of his congregation. But invariably he came away from
them with an inner sense of having been baffled in this object. With a
few exceptions, these modern people seemed to have no time for friendship
in the real meaning of the word, no desire to carry a relationship beyond
a certain point. Although he was their spiritual pastor, he knew less
about most of them at the end of the winter than their butlers and their
maids.
They were kind, they were delightful, they were interested in him--he
occasionally thought--as a somewhat anachronistic phenomenon. They
petted, respected him, and deferred to him. He represented to them an
element in life they recognized, and which had its proper niche. What
they failed to acknowledge was his point of view--and this he was wise
enough not to press at dinner tables and in drawing-rooms--that religion
should have the penetrability of ether; that it should be the absorbent
of life. He did not have to commit the banality of reminding them of
this conviction of his at their own tables; he had sufficient humour and
penetration to credit them with knowing it. Nay, he went farther in his
unsuspected analysis, and perceived that these beliefs made one of his
chief attractions for them. It was pleasant to have authority in a black
coat at one's board; to defer, if not to bend to it. The traditions of
fashion demanded a clergyman in the milieu, and the more tenaciously he
clung to his prerogatives, the better they liked it.
Although they were conscious of a certain pressure, which they gently
resisted, they did not divine that the radiating and rugged young man
cherished serious designs upon them. He did not expect to transform the
world in a day, especially the modern world. He was biding his time,
awaiting individual opportunities.
They talked to him of the parish work, congratulated him on the vigour
with which he had attacked it, and often declared themselves jealous of
it because it claimed too much of him. Dear Dr. Gilman, they said, had
had neither the strength nor the perception of 'modern needs; and McCrae,
the first assistant clergyman, while a good man, was a plodder and
lacking in imagination. They talked sympathetically about the problems
of the poor. And some of them--particularly Mrs. Wallis Plimpton were
inclined to think Hodder's replies a trifle noncommittal. The trouble,
although he did not tell them so, was that he himself had by no means
solved the problem. And he felt a certain reluctance to discuss the
riddle of poverty over champagne and porcelain.
Mrs. Plimpton and Mrs. Constable, Mrs. Ferguson, Mrs. Langmaid, Mrs.
Larrabbee, Mrs. Atterbury, Mrs. Grey, and many other ladies and their
daughters were honorary members of his guilds and societies, and found
time in their busy lives to decorate the church, adorn the altar, care
for the vestments, and visit the parish house. Some of them did more:
Mrs. Larrabbee, for instance, when she was in town, often graced the
girls' classes with her presence, which was a little disquieting to
the daughters of immigrants: a little disquieting, too, to John Hodder.
During the three years that had elapsed since Mr. Larrabbee's death, she
had, with characteristic grace and ease, taken up philanthropy; become,
in particular, the feminine patron saint of Galt House, non-sectarian,
a rescue home for the erring of her sex.
There were, too, in this higher realm of wealth in and out of which
Hodder plunged, women like Mrs. Constable (much older than Mrs.
Larrabbee) with whom philanthropy and what is known as "church work"
had become second nature in a well-ordered life, and who attended with
praiseworthy regularity the meetings of charitable boards and committees,
not infrequently taking an interest in individuals in Mr. Hodder's
classes. With her, on occasions, he did discuss such matters,
only to come away from her with his bewilderment deepened.
It was only natural that he should have his moods of depression. But
the recurrent flow of his energy swept them away. Cynicism had no place
in his militant Christianity, and yet there were times when he wondered
whether these good people really wished achievements from their rector.
They had the air of saying "Bravo!" and then of turning away. And he did
not conceal from himself that he was really doing nothing but labour.
The distances were great; and between his dinner parties, classes,
services, and visits, he was forced to sit far into the night preparing
his sermons, when his brain was not so keen as it might have been.
Indeed--and this thought was cynical and out of character--he asked
himself on one occasion whether his principal achievement so far had not
consisted in getting on unusual terms with Eldon Parr. They were not
lacking who thought so, and who did not hesitate to imply it. They
evidently regarded his growing intimacy with the banker with approval,
as in some sort a supreme qualification for a rector of St. John's, and
a proof of unusual abilities. There could be no question, for instance,
that he had advanced perceptibly in the estimation of the wife of another
of his vestrymen, Mrs. Wallis Plimpton.
The daughter of Thurston Gore, with all her astuteness and real estate,
was of a naivete in regard to spiritual matters that Hodder had grown to
recognize as impermeable. In an evening gown, with a string of large
pearls testing on her firm and glowing neck, she appeared a concrete
refutation of the notion of rebirth, the triumph of an unconscious
philosophy of material common-sense. However, in parish house affairs,
Hodder had found her practical brain of no slight assistance.
"I think it quite wonderful," she remarked, on the occasion at which he
was the guest of honour in what was still called the new Gore mansion,
"that you have come to know Mr. Parr so well in such a short time. How
did you do it, Mr. Hodder? Of course Wallis knows him, and sees a great
deal of him in business matters. He relies on Wallis. But they tell me
you have grown more intimate with him than any one has been since Alison
left him."
There is, in Proverbs or Ecclesiastes, a formula for answering people
in accordance with their point of view. The rector modestly disclaimed
intimacy. And he curbed his curiosity about Alison for the reason that
he preferred to hear her story from another source.
"Oh, but you are intimate!" Mrs. Plimpton protested. "Everybody says
so--that Mr. Parr sends for you all the time. What is he like when he's
alone, and relaxed? Is he ever relaxed?" The lady had a habit of
not waiting for answers to her questions. "Do you know, it stirs my
imagination tremendously when I think of all the power that man has.
I suppose you know he has become one of a very small group of men who
control this country, and naturally he has been cruelly maligned. All he
has to do is to say a word to his secretary, and he can make men or ruin
them. It isn't that he does ruin them--I don't mean that. He uses his
wealth, Wallis says, to maintain the prosperity of the nation! He feels
his trusteeship. And he is so generous! He has given a great deal to
the church, and now," she added, "I am sure he will give more."
Hodder was appalled. He felt helpless before the weight of this
onslaught.
"I dare say he will continue to assist, as he has in the past," he
managed to say.
"Of course it's your disinterestedness," she proclaimed, examining him
frankly. "He feels that you don't want anything. You always strike me
as so splendidly impartial, Mr. Hodder."
Fortunately, he was spared an answer. Mr. Plimpton, who was wont to
apply his gifts as a toastmaster to his own festivals, hailed him from
the other end of the table.
And Nelson Langmaid, who had fallen into the habit of dropping into
Hodder's rooms in the parish house on his way uptown for a chat about
books, had been struck by the rector's friendship with the banker.
"I don't understand how you managed it, Hodder, in such a short time,"
he declared. "Mr. Parr's a difficult man. In all these years, I've been
closer to him than any one else, and I don't know him today half as well
as you do."
"I didn't manage it," said Hodder, briefly.
"Well," replied the lawyer, quizzically, "you needn't eat me up.
I'm sure you didn't do it on purpose. If you had,--to use a Hibernian
phrase,--you never would have done it. I've seen it tried before. To
tell you the truth, after I'd come back from Bremerton, that was the one
thing I was afraid of--that you mightn't get along with him."
Hodder himself was at a loss to account for the relationship. It
troubled him vaguely, for Mr. Parr was the aggressor; and often at dusk,
when Hodder was working under his study lamp, the telephone would ring,
and on taking down the receiver he would hear the banker's voice. "I'm
alone to-night, Mr. Hodder. Will you come and have dinner with me?"
Had he known it, this was a different method of communication than that
which the financier usually employed, one which should have flattered
him. If Wallis Plimpton, for instance, had received such a personal
message, the fact would not have remained unknown the next day at his
club. Sometimes it was impossible for Hodder to go, and he said so; but
he always went when he could.
The unwonted note of appeal (which the telephone seemed somehow to
enhance) in Mr. Parr's voice, never failed to find a response in the
rector's heart, and he would ponder over it as he walked across to Tower
Street to take the electric car for the six-mile trip westward.
This note of appeal he inevitably contrasted with the dry, matter-of-fact
reserve of his greeting at the great house, which loomed all the greater
in the darkness. Unsatisfactory, from many points of view, as these
evenings were, they served to keep whetted Hodder's curiosity as to the
life of this extraordinary man. All of its vaster significance for the
world, its tremendous machinery, was out of his sight.
Mr. Parr seemed indeed to regard the rest of his fellow-creatures with
the suspicion at which Langmaid had hinted, to look askance at the
amenities people tentatively held out to him. And the private watchman
whom Hodder sometimes met in the darkness, and who invariably scrutinized
pedestrians on Park Street, seemed symbolic, of this attitude. On rare
occasions, when in town, the financier dined out, limiting himself to a
few houses.
Once in a long while he attended what are known as banquets, such as
those given by the Chamber of Commerce, though he generally refused to
speak. Hodder, through Mr. Parr's intervention, had gone to one of
these, ably and breezily presided over by the versatile Mr. Plimpton.
Hodder felt not only curiosity and sympathy, but a vexing sense of the
fruitlessness of his visits to Park Street. Mr. Parr seemed to like to
have him there. And the very fact that the conversation rarely took
any vital turn oddly contributed to the increasing permanence of
the lien. To venture on any topic relating to the affairs of the day
were merely to summon forth the banker's dogmatism, and Hodder's own
opinions on such matters were now in a strange and unsettled state. Mr.
Parr liked best to talk of his treasures, and of the circumstances during
his trips abroad that had led to their acquirement. Once the banker had
asked him about parish house matters.
"I'm told you're working very hard--stirring up McCrae. He needs it."
"I'm only trying to study the situation," Hodder replied. "I don't think
you quite do justice to McCrae," he added; "he's very faithful, and seems
to understand those people thoroughly."
Mr. Parr smiled.
"And what conclusions have you come to? If you think the system should
be enlarged and reorganized I am willing at any time to go over it with
you, with a view to making an additional contribution. Personally, while
I have sympathy for the unfortunate, I'm not at all sure that much of the
energy and money put into the institutional work of churches isn't
wasted."
"I haven't come to any conclusions--yet," said the rector, with a touch
of sadness. "Perhaps I demand too much--expect too much."
The financier, deep in his leather chair under the shaded light, the tips
of his fingers pressed together, regarded the younger man thoughtfully,
but the smile lingered in his eyes.
"I told you you would meet problems," he said.
II
Hodder's cosmos might have been compared, indeed, to that set forth in
the Ptolemaic theory of the ancients. Like a cleverly carved Chinese
object of ivory in the banker s collection, it was a system of spheres,
touching, concentric, yet separate. In an outer space swung Mr. Parr;
then came the scarcely less rarefied atmosphere of the Constables and
Atterburys, Fergusons, Plimptons, Langmaids, Prestons, Larrabbees, Greys,
and Gores, and then a smaller sphere which claims but a passing mention.
There were, in the congregation of St. John's, a few people of moderate
means whose houses or apartments the rector visited; people to whom
modern life was increasingly perplexing.
In these ranks were certain maiden ladies and widows who found in church
work an outlet to an otherwise circumscribed existence. Hodder met them
continually in his daily rounds. There were people like the Bradleys,
who rented half a pew and never missed a Sunday; Mr. Bradley, an elderly
man whose children had scattered, was an upper clerk in one of Mr. Parr's
trust companies: there were bachelors and young women, married or single,
who taught in the Sunday school or helped with the night classes. For
the most part, all of these mentioned above belonged to an element that
once had had a comfortable and well-recognized place in the community,
yet had somehow been displaced. Many of them were connected by blood
with more fortunate parishioners, but economic pressure had scattered
them throughout new neighbourhoods and suburbs. Tradition still bound
them to St. John's.
With no fixed orbit, the rector cut at random through all of these
strata, and into a fourth. Not very far into it, for this apparently
went down to limitless depths, the very contemplation of which made him
dizzy. The parish house seemed to float precariously on its surface.
Owing partly to the old-fashioned ideas of Dr. Gilman, and partly to
the conservatism of its vestry, the institutionalism of St. John's was
by no means up to date. No settlement house, with day nurseries, was
maintained in the slums. The parish house, built in the, early nineties,
had its gymnasium hall and class and reading rooms, but was not what in
these rapidly moving times would be called modern. Presiding over its
activities, and seconded by a pale, but earnest young man recently
ordained, was Hodder's first assistant, the Reverend Mr. McCrae.
McCrae was another puzzle. He was fifty and gaunt, with a wide flat
forehead and thinning, grey hair, and wore steel spectacles. He had a
numerous family. His speech, of which he was sparing, bore strong traces
of a Caledonian accent. And this, with the addition of the fact that he
was painstaking and methodical in his duties, and that his sermons were
orthodox in the sense that they were extremely non-committal, was all
that Hodder knew about him for many months. He never doubted, however,
the man's sincerity and loyalty.
But McCrae had a peculiar effect on him, and as time went on, his
conviction deepened that his assistant was watching him. The fact that
this tacit criticism did not seem unkindly did not greatly alleviate
the impatience that he felt from time to time. He had formed a higher
estimate of McCrae's abilities than that generally prevailing throughout
the parish; and in spite of, perhaps because of his attitude, was drawn
toward the man. This attitude, as Hodder analyzed it from the
expressions he occasionally surprised on his assistant's face, was one
of tolerance and experience, contemplating, with a faint amusement and
a certain regret, the wasteful expenditure of youthful vitality. Yet
it involved more. McCrae looked as if he knew--knew many things that
he deemed it necessary for the new rector to find out by experience.
But he was a difficult man to talk to.
If the truth be told, the more Hodder became absorbed in these activities
of the parish house, the greater grew his perplexity, the more acute his
feeling of incompleteness; or rather, his sense that the principle was
somehow fundamentally at fault. Out of the waters of the proletariat
they fished, assiduously and benignly, but at random, strange specimens!
brought them, as it were, blinking to the light, and held them by sheer
struggling. And sometimes, when they slipped away, dived after them.
The young curate, Mr. Tompkinson, for the most part did the diving; or,
in scriptural language, the searching after the lost sheep.