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+Project Gutenberg's The Inside of the Cup, Volume 3, by Winston Churchill
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Inside of the Cup, Volume 3
+
+Author: Winston Churchill
+
+Release Date: October 17, 2004 [EBook #5358]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INSIDE OF THE CUP, VOLUME 3 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE INSIDE OF THE CUP
+
+By Winston Churchill
+
+
+
+Volume 3.
+
+IX.    THE DIVINE DISCONTENT
+X.    THE MESSENGER IN THE CHURCH
+XI.    THE LOST PARISHIONER
+XII.   THE WOMAN OF THE SONG
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE DIVINE DISCONTENT
+
+I
+
+It was the last Sunday in May, and in another week the annual flight to
+the seashore and the mountains would have begun again. The breezes
+stealing into the church through the open casements wafted hither and
+thither the odours of the chancel flowers, and mingled with those fainter
+and subtler perfumes set free by the rustling of summer gowns.
+
+As on this day he surveyed his decorous and fashionable congregation,
+Hodder had something of that sense of extremity which the great apostle
+to the Gentiles himself must have felt when he stood in the midst of the
+Areopagus and made his vain yet sublime appeal to Athenian indifference
+and luxury. "And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now
+commandeth all men everywhere to repent." . . Some, indeed, stirred
+uneasily as the rector paused, lowering their eyes before the intensity
+of his glance, vaguely realizing that the man had flung the whole passion
+of his being into the appeal.
+
+Heedlessness--that was God's accusation against them, against the age.
+Materialism, individualism! So absorbed were they in the pursuit of
+wealth, of distraction, so satisfied with the current philosophy, so
+intent on surrounding themselves with beautiful things and thus shutting
+out the sterner view, that they had grown heedless of the divine message.
+How few of them availed themselves of their spiritual birthright to renew
+their lives at the altar rail! And they had permitted their own children
+to wander away . . . . Repent!
+
+There was a note of desperation in his appeal, like that of the hermit
+who stands on a mountain crag and warns the gay and thoughtless of the
+valley of the coming avalanche. Had they heard him at last? There were
+a few moments of tense silence, during which he stood gazing at them.
+Then he raised his arm in benediction, gathered up his surplice,
+descended the pulpit steps, and crossed swiftly the chancel . . . .
+
+He had, as it were, turned on all the power in a supreme effort to reach
+them. What if he had failed again? Such was the misgiving that beset
+him, after the service, as he got out of his surplice, communicated by
+some occult telepathy . . . . Mr. Parr was awaiting him, and
+summoning his courage, hope battling against intuition, he opened the
+door into the now empty church and made his way toward the porch, where
+the sound of voices warned him that several persons were lingering. The
+nature of their congratulations confirmed his doubts. Mrs. Plimpton,
+resplendent and looking less robust than usual in one of her summer Paris
+gowns, greeted him effusively.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Hodder, what a wonderful sermon!" she cried. "I can't express
+how it made me feel--so delinquent! Of course that is exactly the effect
+you wished. And I was just telling Wallis I was so glad I waited until
+Tuesday to go East, or I should have missed it. You surely must come on
+to Hampton and visit us, and preach it over again in our little stone
+church there, by the sea. Good-by and don't forget! I'll write you,
+setting the date, only we'd be glad to have you any time."
+
+"One of the finest I ever heard--if not the finest," Mr. Plimpton
+declared, with a kind of serious 'empressement', squeezing his hand.
+
+Others stopped him; Everett Constable, for one, and the austere Mrs.
+Atterbury. Hodder would have avoided the ever familiar figure of her
+son, Gordon, in the invariable black cutaway and checked trousers,
+but he was standing beside Mr. Parr.
+
+"Ahem! Why, Mr. Hodder," he exclaimed, squinting off his glasses,
+"that was a magnificent effort. I was saying to Mr. Parr that it isn't
+often one hears a sermon nowadays as able as that, and as sound. Many
+clergymen refrain from preaching them, I sometimes think, because they
+are afraid people won't like them."
+
+"I scarcely think it's that," the rector replied, a little shortly.
+"We're afraid people won't heed them."
+
+He became aware, as he spoke, of a tall young woman, who had cast an
+enigmatic glance first at Gordon Atterbury, and then at himself.
+
+"It was a good sermon," said Mr. Parr. "You're coming to lunch, Hodder?"
+
+The rector nodded. "I'm ready when you are," he answered.
+
+"The motor's waiting," said the banker, leading the way down the steps to
+the sidewalk, where he turned. "Alison, let me introduce Mr. Hodder.
+This is my daughter," he added simply.
+
+This sudden disclosure of the young woman's identity had upon Hodder a
+certain electric effect, and with it came a realization of the extent to
+which--from behind the scenes, so to speak--she had gradually aroused him
+to a lively speculation. She seemed to have influenced, to a greater or
+less degree, so many lives with which he had come into touch! Compelled
+persons to make up their minds about her! And while he sympathized
+with Eldon Parr in his abandonment, he had never achieved the full
+condemnation which he felt--an impartial Christian morality would have
+meted out.
+
+As he uttered the conventional phrase and took her hand, he asked himself
+whether her personality justified his interest. Her glance at Gordon
+Atterbury in the midst of that gentleman's felicitations on the sermon
+had been expressive, Hodder thought, of veiled amusement slightly
+tinctured with contempt; and he, Hodder, felt himself to have grown warm
+over it. He could not be sure that Alison Parr had not included, in her
+inner comment, the sermon likewise, on which he had so spent himself.
+What was she doing at church? As her eyes met his own, he seemed to
+read a challenge. He had never encountered a woman--he decided--who
+so successfully concealed her thought, and at the same time so incited
+curiosity about it.
+
+The effect of her reappearance on Gordon Atterbury was painfully
+apparent, and Mrs. Larrabbee's remark, "that he had never got over it,"
+recurred to Hodder. He possessed the virtue of being faithful, at least,
+in spite of the lady's apostasy, and he seemed to be galvanized into a
+tenfold nervousness as he hustled after them and handed her, with the
+elaborate attention little men are apt to bestow upon women, into the
+motor.
+
+"Er--how long shall you be here, Alison?" he asked. "I don't know," she
+answered, not unkindly, but with a touch of indifference.
+
+"You treat us shamefully," he informed her, "upon my word! But I'm
+coming to call."
+
+"Do," said Alison. Hodder caught her eye again, and this time he was
+sure that she surprised in him a certain disdain of Mr. Atterbury's zeal.
+Her smile was faint, yet unmistakable.
+
+He resented it. Indeed, it was with a well-defined feeling of antagonism
+that he took his seat, and this was enhanced as they flew westward, Mr.
+Parr wholly absorbed with the speaking trumpet, energetically rebuking at
+every bounce. In the back of the rector's mind lay a weight, which he
+identified, at intervals, with what he was now convinced was the failure
+of his sermon. . . Alison took no part in the casual conversation that
+began when they reached the boulevard and Mr. Parr abandoned the trumpet,
+but lay back in silence and apparently with entire comfort in a corner of
+the limousine.
+
+At the lunch-table Mr. Parr plunged into a discussion of some of the
+still undecided details of the new settlement house, in which, as the
+plan developed, he had become more and more interested. He had made
+himself responsible, from time to time, for additional sums, until the
+original estimate had been almost doubled. Most of his suggestions had
+come from Hodder, who had mastered the subject with a thoroughness that
+appealed to the financier: and he had gradually accepted the rector's
+idea of concentrating on the children. Thus he had purchased an
+adjoining piece of land that was to be a model playground, in connection
+with the gymnasium and swimming-pool. The hygienic department was to be
+all that modern science could desire.
+
+"If we are going to do the thing," the banker would, remark, "we may as
+well do it thoroughly; we may as well be leaders and not followers."
+
+So, little by little, the scheme had grown to proportions that sometimes
+appalled the rector when he realized how largely he had been responsible
+for the additions,--in spite of the lukewarmness with which he had begun.
+And yet it had occasionally been Mr. Parr who, with a sweep of his hand,
+had added thousands to a particular feature: thus the dance-hall had
+become, in prospect, a huge sun-parlour at the top of the building, where
+the children were to have their kindergartens and games in winter; and
+which might be shaded and opened up to the breezes in summer. What had
+reconciled Hodder to the enterprise most of all, however, was the chapel
+--in the plan a beautiful Gothic church--whereby he hoped to make the
+religious progress keep pace with the social. Mr. Parr was decidedly in
+sympathy with this intention, and referred to it now.
+
+"I was much impressed by what you said in your sermon to-day as to the
+need of insisting upon authority in religious matters," he declared, "and
+I quite agree that we should have a chapel of some size at the settlement
+house for that reason. Those people need spiritual control. It's what
+the age needs. And when I think of some of the sermons printed in the
+newspapers to-day, and which are served up as Christianity, there is only
+one term to apply to them--they are criminally incendiary."
+
+"But isn't true Christianity incendiary, in your meaning of the word?"
+
+It was Alison who spoke, in a quiet and musical voice that was in
+striking contrast to the tone of Mr. Parr, which the rector had thought
+unusually emphatic. It was the first time she had shown an inclination
+to contribute to the talk. But since Hodder had sat down at the table
+her presence had disturbed him, and he had never been wholly free from an
+uncomfortable sense that he was being measured and weighed.
+
+Once or twice he had stolen a glance at her as she sat, perfectly at
+ease, and asked himself whether she had beauty, and it dawned upon him
+little by little that the very proportion she possessed made for physical
+unobtrusiveness. She was really very tall for a woman. At first he
+would have said her nose was straight, when he perceived that it had a
+delicate hidden curve; her eyes were curiously set, her dark hair parted
+in the middle, brought down low on each side of the forehead and tied in
+a Grecian knot. Thus, in truth, he observed, were seemingly all the
+elements of the classic, even to the firm yet slender column of the neck.
+How had it eluded him?
+
+Her remark, if it astonished Hodder, had a dynamic effect on Eldon Parr.
+And suddenly the rector comprehended that the banker had not so much been
+talking to him as through him; had been, as it were, courting opposition.
+
+"What do you mean by Christianity being incendiary?" he demanded.
+
+"Incendiary, from your point of view--I made, the qualification,"
+Alison replied, apparently unmoved by his obvious irritation. "I don't
+pretend to be a Christian, as you know, but if there is one element
+in Christianity that distinguishes it, it is the brotherhood of man.
+That's pure nitroglycerin, though it's been mixed with so much sawdust.
+Incendiary is a mild epithet. I never read the sermons you refer to;
+I dare say they're crude, but they're probably attempts to release an
+explosive which would blow your comfortable social system and its
+authority into atoms."
+
+Hodder, who had listened in amazement, glanced at the banker. He had
+never before heard him opposed, or seen him really angry.
+
+"I've heard that doctrine," cried Mr. Parr. "Those who are dissatisfied
+with things as they are because they have been too stupid or too weak
+or self-indulgent to rise, find it easy to twist the principles of
+Christianity into revolutionary propaganda. It's a case of the devil
+quoting Scripture. The brotherhood of man! There has never been an age
+when philanthropy and organized charity were on such a scale as to-day."
+
+A certain gallant, indomitable ring crept into Alison's voice; she did
+not seem in the least dismayed or overborne.
+
+"But isn't that just where most so-called Christians make their mistake?"
+she asked. "Philanthropy and organized charity, as they exist to-day,
+have very little to do with the brotherhood of man. Mightn't it be you
+who are fooling yourselves instead of the incendiaries fooling themselves
+So long as you can make yourselves believe that this kind of charity is
+a logical carrying out of the Christian principles, so long are your
+consciences satisfied with the social system which your class, very
+naturally, finds so comfortable and edifying. The weak and idiotic ought
+to be absurdly grateful for what is flung to them, and heaven is gained
+in the throwing. In this way the rich inevitably become the elect, both
+here and hereafter, and the needle's eye is widened into a gap."
+
+There was on Mr. Parr's lips a smile not wholly pleasant to see. Indeed,
+in the last few minutes there had been revealed to Hodder a side of the
+banker's character which had escaped him in the two years of their
+acquaintance.
+
+"I suppose," said Mr. Parr, slowly, drumming on the table, "you would say
+that of the new settlement house of St. John's, whereby we hope to raise
+a whole neighbourhood."
+
+"Yes, I should," replied Alison, with spirit. "The social system by
+which you thrive, and which politically and financially you strive to
+maintain, is diametrically opposed to your creed, which is supposed to be
+the brotherhood of man. But if that were really your creed, you would
+work for it politically and financially. You would see that your Church
+is trying to do infinitesimally what the government, but for your
+opposition, might do universally. Your true creed is the survival of the
+fittest. You grind these people down into what is really an economic
+slavery and dependence, and then you insult and degrade them by inviting
+them to exercise and read books and sing hymns in your settlement house,
+and give their children crackers and milk and kindergartens and sunlight!
+I don't blame them for not becoming Christians on that basis. Why, the
+very day I left New York a man over eighty, who had been swindled out
+of all he had, rather than go to one of those Christian institutions
+deliberately forged a check and demanded to be sent to the penitentiary.
+He said he could live and die there with some self-respect."
+
+"I might have anticipated that you would ultimately become a Socialist,
+Alison," Mr. Parr remarked--but his voice trembled.
+
+"I don't know whether I'm a Socialist or an Anarchist," she answered.
+Hodder thought be detected a note of hopelessness in her voice, and the
+spirit in it ebbed a little. Not only did she seem indifferent to her
+father's feeling--which incidentally added fuel to it--but her splendid
+disregard of him, as a clergyman, had made an oddly powerful appeal.
+And her argument! His feelings, as he listened to this tremendous
+arraignment of Eldon Parr by his daughter, are not easily to be
+described. To say that she had compelled him, the rector of St. John's,
+at last to look in the face many conditions which he had refused to
+recognize would be too definite a statement. Nevertheless, some such
+thing had occurred. Refutations sprang to his lips, and died there,
+though he had no notion of uttering them. He saw that to admit her
+contentions would be to behold crumble into ruins the structure that
+he had spent a life in rearing; and yet something within him responded
+to her words--they had the passionate, convincing ring of truth.
+
+By no means the least of their disturbing effects was due to the fact
+that they came as a climax to, as a fulfilment of the revelation he had
+had at the Fergusons', when something of the true nature of Mr. Plimpton
+and others of his congregation had suddenly been laid bare. And now
+Hodder looked at Eldon Parr to behold another man from the one he had
+known, and in that moment realized that their relationship could never
+again be the same. . . Were his sympathies with the daughter?
+
+"I don't know what I believe," said Alison, after a pause. "I've ceased
+trying to find out. What's the use!" She appeared now to be addressing
+no one in particular.
+
+A servant entered with a card, and the banker's hand shook perceptibly
+as he put down his claret and adjusted his glasses.
+
+"Show him into my office upstairs, and tell him I'll see him at once," he
+said, and glanced at the rector. But it was Alison whom he addressed.
+"I must leave Mr. Hodder to answer your arguments," he added, with an
+attempt at lightness; and then to the rector: "Perhaps you can convince
+her that the Church is more sinned against than sinning, and that
+Christians are not such terrible monsters after all. You'll excuse me?"
+
+"Certainly." Hodder had risen.
+
+
+
+II
+
+"Shall we have coffee in the garden?" Alison asked. "It's much nicer
+outside this time of year."
+
+For an instant he was at a loss to decide whether to accede, or to make
+an excuse and leave the house. Wisdom seemed to point to flight. But
+when he glanced at her he saw to his surprise that the mood of
+abstraction into which she had fallen still held her; that the discussion
+which had aroused Eldon Parr to such dramatic anger had left her serious
+and thoughtful. She betrayed no sense of triumph at having audaciously
+and successfully combated him, and she appeared now only partially to be
+aware of Hodder's presence. His interest, his curiosity mounted suddenly
+again, overwhelming once more the antagonism which he had felt come and
+go in waves; and once more his attempted classification of her was swept
+away. She had relapsed into an enigma.
+
+"I like the open air," he answered, "and I have always wished to see the
+garden. I have admired it from the windows."
+
+"It's been on my mind for some years," she replied, as she led the way
+down a flight of steps into the vine-covered pergola. "And I intend to
+change parts of it while I am out here. It was one of my first attempts,
+and I've learned more since."
+
+"You must forgive my ignorant praise," he said, and smiled. "I have
+always thought it beautiful: But I can understand that an artist is never
+satisfied."
+
+She turned to him, and suddenly their eyes met and held in a momentary,
+electric intensity that left him warm and agitated. There was nothing
+coquettish in the glance, but it was the first distinct manifestation
+that he was of consequence. She returned his smile, without levity.
+
+"Is a clergyman ever satisfied?" she asked.
+
+"He ought not to be," replied Hodder, wondering whether she had read him.
+
+"Although you were so considerate, I suppose you must have thought it
+presumptuous of me to criticize your, profession, which is religion."
+
+"Religion, I think, should be everybody's," he answered quietly.
+
+She made no reply. And he entered, as into another world, the circular
+arbour in which the pergola ended, so complete in contrast was its
+atmosphere to that of the house. The mansion he had long since grown to
+recognize as an expression of the personality of its owner, but this
+classic bower was as remote from it as though it were in Greece. He was
+sensitive to beauty, yet the beauty of the place had a perplexing
+quality, which he felt in the perfect curves of the marble bench, in the
+marble basin brimming to the tip with clear water,--the surface of which,
+flecked with pink petals, mirrored the azure sky through the leafy
+network of the roof. In one green recess a slender Mercury hastily
+adjusted his sandal.
+
+Was this, her art, the true expression of her baffling personality? As
+she had leaned back in the corner of the automobile she had given him the
+impression of a languor almost Oriental, but this had been startlingly
+dispelled at the lunch-table by the revelation of an animation and a
+vitality which had magically transformed her. But now, as under the
+spell of a new encompassment of her own weaving, she seemed to revert to
+her former self, sinking, relaxed, into a wicker lounge beside the basin,
+one long and shapely hand in the water, the other idle in her lap. Her
+eyes, he remarked, were the contradiction in her face. Had they been
+larger, and almond-shaped, the illusion might have been complete. They
+were neither opaque nor smouldering,--but Western eyes, amber-coloured,
+with delicately stencilled rays and long lashes. And as they gazed up at
+him now they seemed to reflect, without disclosing the flitting thoughts
+behind them. He felt antagonism and attraction in almost equal degree
+--the situation transcended his experience.
+
+"You don't intend to change this?" he asked, with an expressive sweep of
+his hand.
+
+"No," she said, "I've always liked it. Tell me what you feel about it."
+
+He hesitated.
+
+"You resent it," she declared.
+
+"Why do you say that?" he demanded quickly.
+
+"I feel it," she answered calmly, but with a smile.
+
+"'Resent' would scarcely be the proper word," he contended, returning her
+smile, yet hesitating again.
+
+"You think it pagan," she told him.
+
+"Perhaps I do," he answered simply, as though impressed by her felicitous
+discovery of the adjective.
+
+Alison laughed.
+
+"It's pagan because I'm pagan, I suppose."
+
+"It's very beautiful--you have managed to get an extraordinary
+atmosphere," he continued, bent on doing himself an exact justice. But
+I should say, if you pressed me, that it represents to me the deification
+of beauty to the exclusion of all else. You have made beauty the Alpha
+and Omega."
+
+"There is nothing else for me," she said.
+
+The coffee-tray arrived and was deposited on a wicker table beside her.
+She raised herself on an elbow, filled his cup and handed it to him.
+
+"And yet," he persisted, "from the manner in which you spoke at the
+table--"
+
+"Oh, don't imagine I haven't thought? But thinking isn't--believing."
+
+"No," he admitted, with a touch of sadness, "you are right. There were
+certain comments you made on the Christian religion--"
+
+She interrupted him again.
+
+"As to the political side of it, which is Socialism, so far as I can
+see. If there is any other side, I have never been able to discover it.
+It seems to me that if Christians were logical, they should be
+Socialists. The brotherhood of man, cooperation--all that is Socialism,
+isn't it? It's opposed to the principle of the survival of the fittest,
+which so many of these so-called Christians practise. I used to think,
+when I came back from Paris, that I was a Socialist, and I went to a lot
+of their meetings in New York, and to lectures. But after a while I saw
+there was something in Socialism that didn't appeal to me, something
+smothering,--a forced cooperation that did not leave one free. I wanted
+to be free, I've been striving all my life to be free," she exclaimed
+passionately, and was silent an instant, inspecting him. "Perhaps I owe
+you an apology for speaking as I did before a clergyman--especially
+before an honest one."
+
+He passed over the qualification with a characteristic smile.
+
+"Oh, if we are going to shut our ears to criticism we'd better give up
+being clergymen," he answered. "I'm afraid there is a great deal of
+truth in what you said."
+
+"That's generous of you!" she exclaimed, and thrilled him with the
+tribute. Nor was the tribute wholly in the words: there had come
+spontaneously into her voice an exquisite, modulated note that haunted
+him long after it had died away . . . .
+
+"I had to say what I thought," she continued earnestly; "I stood it as
+long as I could. Perhaps you didn't realize it, but my father was
+striking at me when he referred to your sermon, and spiritual control
+--and in other things he said when you were talking about the
+settlement-house. He reserves for himself the right to do as he pleases,
+but insists that those who surround him shall adopt the subserviency
+which he thinks proper for the rest of the world. If he were a Christian
+himself, I shouldn't mind it so much."
+
+Hodder was silent. The thought struck him with the force of a great
+wind.
+
+"He's a Pharisee," Alison went on, following the train of her thought.
+"I remember the first time I discovered that--it was when I was reading
+the New Testament carefully, in the hope of finding something in
+Christianity I might take hold of. And I was impressed particularly by
+the scorn with which Christ treated the Pharisees. My father, too, if he
+had lived in those days, would have thought Christ a seditious person, an
+impractical, fanatical idealist, and would have tried to trip him up with
+literal questions concerning the law. His real and primary interest--is
+in a social system that benefits himself and his kind, and because this
+is so, he, and men like him, would have it appear that Christianity is
+on the side of what they term law and order. I do not say that they are
+hypocritical, that they reason this out. They are elemental; and they
+feel intuitively that Christianity contains a vital spark which, if
+allowed to fly, would start a conflagration beyond their control. The
+theologians have helped them to cover the spark with ashes, and naturally
+they won't allow the ashes to be touched, if they can help it."
+
+She lay very still.
+
+The rector had listened to her, at first with amazement, then with more
+complicated sensations as she thus dispassionately discussed the foremost
+member of his congregation and the first layman of the diocese, who was
+incidentally her own father. In her masterly analysis of Eldon Parr, she
+had brought Hodder face to face with the naked truth, and compelled him
+to recognize it. How could he attempt to refute it, with honesty?
+
+He remembered Mr. Parr's criticism of Alison. There had been hardness in
+that, though it were the cry of a lacerated paternal affection. In that,
+too, a lack of comprehension, an impotent anger at a visitation not
+understood, a punishment apparently unmerited. Hodder had pitied him
+then--he still pitied him. In the daughter's voice was no trace of
+resentment. No one, seemingly, could be farther removed from him (the
+rector of St. John's) in her opinions and views of life, than Allison
+Parr; and yet he felt in her an undercurrent, deep and strong, which
+moved him strangely, strongly, irresistibly; he recognized a passionate
+desire for the truth, and the courage to face it at any cost, and a
+capacity for tenderness, revealed in flashes.
+
+"I have hurt you," she exclaimed. "I am sorry."
+
+He collected himself.
+
+"It is not you who have hurt me," he replied. "Reflections on the
+contradictions and imperfections of life are always painful. And since
+I have been here, I have seen a great deal of your father."
+
+"You are fond of him!"
+
+He hesitated. It was not an ordinary conversation they were dealing with
+realities, and he had a sense that vital issues were at stake. He had,
+in that moment, to make a revaluation of his sentiments for the
+financier--to weigh the effect of her indictment.
+
+"Yes," he answered slowly, "I am fond of him. He has shown me a side of
+himself, perhaps, that other men have not seen,--and he is very lonely."
+
+"You pity him." He started at her word. "I guessed that from an
+expression that crossed your face when we were at the table. But surely
+you must have observed the incongruity of his relationship with your
+Church! Surely, in preaching as you did this morning against
+materialism, individualism, absorption in the pursuit of wealth, you must
+have had my father in mind as the supreme example! And yet he listened
+to you as serenely as though he had never practised any of these things!
+
+"Clergymen wonder why Christianity doesn't make more progress to-day;
+well, what strikes the impartial observer who thinks about the subject at
+all, as one reason, is the paralyzing inconsistency of an alliance
+between those who preach the brotherhood of man and those who are opposed
+to it. I've often wondered what clergymen would say about it, if they
+were frank--only I never see any clergymen."
+
+He was strongly agitated. He did not stop--strangely enough--to reflect
+how far they had gone, to demand by what right she brought him to the
+bar, challenged the consistency of his life. For she had struck, with a
+ruthless precision, at the very core of his trouble, revealed it for what
+it was.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I can see how we may be accused of inconsistency, and
+with much justice."
+
+His refusal to excuse and vindicate himself impressed her as no attempt
+at extenuation could have done. Perhaps, in that moment, her quick
+instinct divined something of his case, something of the mental suffering
+he strove to conceal. Contrition shone in her eyes.
+
+"I ought not to have said that," she exclaimed gently. "It is so easy
+for outsiders to criticize those who are sincere--and I am sure you are.
+We cannot know all the perplexities. But when we look at the Church, we
+are puzzled by that--which I have mentioned--and by other things."
+
+"What other things?" he demanded.
+
+She hesitated in her turn.
+
+"I suppose you think it odd, my having gone to church, feeling as I do,"
+she said. "But St. John's is now the only place vividly associated with
+my mother. She was never at home here, in this house. I always go at
+least once when I am out here. And I listened to your sermon intently."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I wanted to tell you this: you interested me as I had not been
+interested since I was twenty, when I made a desperate attempt to become
+a Christian--and failed. Do you know how you struck me? It was as a man
+who actually had a great truth which he was desperately trying to impart,
+and could not. I have not been in a church more than a dozen times in
+the last eight years, but you impressed me as a man who felt something
+--whatever it is."
+
+He did not speak.
+
+"But why," she cried, "do you insist on what you cell authority? As a
+modern woman who has learned to use her own mind, I simply can't believe,
+if the God of the universe is the moral God you assert him to be, that he
+has established on earth an agency of the kind you infer, and delegated
+to it the power of life and death over human souls. Perhaps you do not
+go so far, but if you make the claim at all you must make it in its
+entirety. There is an idea of commercialism, of monopoly in that
+conception which is utterly repugnant to any one who tries to approach
+the subject with a fresh mind, and from an ideal point of view. And
+religion must be idealism--mustn't it?
+
+"Your ancient monks and saints weren't satisfied until they had
+settled every detail of the invisible world, of the past and future.
+They mapped it out as if it were a region they had actually explored,
+like geographers. They used their reason, and what science they had, to
+make theories about it which the churches still proclaim as the catholic
+and final truth. You forbid us to use our reason. You declare, in order
+to become Christians, that we have to accept authoritative statements.
+Oh, can't you see that an authoritative statement is just what an
+ethical person doesn't want? Belief--faith doesn't consist in the mere
+acceptance of a statement, but in something much higher--if we can
+achieve it. Acceptance of authority is not faith, it is mere credulity,
+it is to shirk the real issue. We must believe, if we believe at all,
+without authority. If we knew, there would be no virtue in striving.
+If I choose a God," she added, after a pause, "I cannot take a consensus
+of opinion about him,--he must be my God."
+
+Hodder did not speak immediately. Strange as it may seem, he had
+never heard the argument, and the strength of it, reenforced by the
+extraordinary vitality and earnestness of the woman who had uttered it,
+had a momentary stunning effect. He sat contemplating her as she lay
+back among the cushions, and suddenly he seemed to see in her the
+rebellious child of which her father had spoken. No wonder Eldon Parr
+had misunderstood her, had sought to crush her spirit! She was to be
+dealt with in no common way, nor was the consuming yearning he discerned
+in her to be lightly satisfied.
+
+"The God of the individualist," he said at length--musingly, not
+accusingly.
+
+"I am an individualist," she admitted simply. "But I am at least logical
+in that philosophy, and the individualists who attend the churches to-day
+are not. The inconsistency of their lives is what makes those of us who
+do not go to church doubt the efficacy of their creed, which seems to
+have no power to change them. The majority of people in St. John's are
+no more Christians than I am. They attend service once a week, and the
+rest of the time they are bent upon getting all they can of pleasure
+and profit for themselves. Do you wonder that those who consider this
+spectacle come inevitably to the conclusion that either Christianity
+is at fault, is outworn, or else that it is presented in the wrong way?"
+
+The rector rose abruptly, walked to the entrance of the arbour, and stood
+staring out across the garden. Presently he turned and came back and
+stood over her.
+
+"Since you ask me," he said slowly, "I do not wonder at it."
+
+She raised her eyes swiftly.
+
+"When you speak like that," she exclaimed with an enthusiasm that
+stirred him, despite the trouble of his mind, "I cannot think of you as
+a clergyman,--but as a man. Indeed," she added, in the surprise of her
+discovery, "I have never thought of you as a clergyman--even when I first
+saw you this morning. I could not account then for a sense of duality
+about you that puzzled me. Do you always preach as earnestly as that?"
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I felt as if you were throwing your whole soul into the effort-=oh,
+I felt it distinctly. You made some of them, temporarily, a little
+uncomfortable, but they do not understand you, and you didn't change
+them. It seemed to me you realized this when Gordon Atterbury spoke to
+you. I tried to analyze the effect on myself--if it had been in the
+slightest degree possible for my reason to accept what you said you
+might, through sheer personality, have compelled me to reconsider.
+As it was, I found myself resisting you."
+
+With his hands clasped behind him, he paced across the arbour and back
+again.
+
+"Have you ever definitely and sincerely tried to put what the Church
+teaches into practice?" he asked.
+
+"Orthodox Christianity? penance, asceticism, self-abnegation--repression
+--falling on my knees and seeking a forgiveness out of all proportion to
+the trespass, and filled with a sense of total depravity? If I did that
+I should lose myself--the only valuable thing I've got."
+
+Hodder, who had resumed his pacing, glanced at her involuntarily, and
+fought an inclination to agree with her.
+
+"I see no one upon whom I can rely but myself," she went on with the
+extraordinary energy she was able to summon at will, "and I am
+convinced that self-sacrifice--at least, indiscriminate, unreasoning
+self-sacrifice--is worse than useless, and to teach it is criminal
+ignorance. None of the so-called Christian virtues appeals to me: I hate
+humility. You haven't it. The only happiness I can see in the world lies
+in self-expression, and I certainly shouldn't find that in sewing
+garments for the poor.
+
+"The last thing that I could wish for would be immortality as orthodox
+Christianity depicts it! And suppose I had followed the advice of my
+Christian friends and remained here, where they insisted my duty was,
+what would have happened to me? In a senseless self-denial I should
+gradually have, withered into a meaningless old maid, with no opinions
+of my own, and no more definite purpose in life than to write checks for
+charities. Your Christianity commands that women shall stay at home, and
+declares that they are not entitled to seek their own salvation, to have
+any place in affairs, or to meddle with the realm of the intellect.
+Those forbidden gardens are reserved for the lordly sex. St. Paul, you
+say, put us in our proper place some twenty centuries ago, and we are to
+remain there for all time."
+
+He felt sweeping through him the reverse current of hostility.
+
+"And what I preach," he asked, "has tended to confirm you in such a mean
+conception of Christianity?"
+
+Her eye travelled over the six feet of him--the kindling, reflecting eye
+of the artist; it rested for a moment on the protesting locks of his
+hair, which apparently could not be cut short enough to conform; on the
+hands, which were strong and sinewy; on the wide, tolerant mouth, with
+its rugged furrows, on the breadth and height of the forehead. She lay
+for a moment, inert, considering.
+
+"What you preach--yes," she answered, bravely meeting his look. "What
+you are--no. You and your religion are as far apart as the poles. Oh,
+this old argument, the belief that has been handed down to the man, the
+authority with which he is clothed, and not the man himself! How can one
+be a factor in life unless one represents something which is the fruit of
+actual, personal experience? Your authority is for the weak, the timid,
+the credulous,--for those who do not care to trust themselves, who run
+for shelter from the storms of life to a 'papier-mache' fortress, made to
+look like rock. In order to preach that logically you should be a white
+ascetic, with a well-oiled manner, a downcast look lest you stumble in
+your pride; lest by chance you might do something original that sprang
+out of your own soul instead of being an imitation of the saints. And if
+your congregation took your doctrine literally, I can see a whole army of
+white, meek Christians. But you are not like that. Can't you see it for
+yourself?" she exclaimed.
+
+"Can't you feel that you are an individual, a personality, a force that
+might be put to great uses? That will be because you are open-minded,
+because there is room in you for growth and change?"
+
+He strove with all his might to quell the inner conflagration which she
+had fanned into leaping flames. Though he had listened before to doubt
+and criticism, this woman, with her strange shifting moods of calm and
+passion, with her bewildering faculty of changing from passive to active
+resistance, her beauty (once manifest, never to be forgotten), her unique
+individuality that now attracted, now repelled, seemed for the moment the
+very incarnation of the forces opposed to him and his religion. Holder,
+as he looked at her, had a flash of fierce resentment that now, of all
+times, she should suddenly have flung herself across his path. For she
+was to be reckoned with. Why did he not tell her she was an egoist? Why
+didn't he speak out, defend his faith, denounce her views as prejudiced
+and false?
+
+"Have I made you angry?" he heard her say. "I am sorry."
+
+It was the hint of reproach in her tone to which the man in him instantly
+responded. And what he saw now was his portrait she had painted. The
+thought came to him: was he indeed greater, more vital than the religion
+he professed? God forbid! Did he ring true, and it false?
+
+She returned his gaze. And gradually, under her clear olive skin, he saw
+the crimson colour mounting higher . . . . She put forth her hand,
+simply, naturally, and pressed his own, as though they had been friends
+for a lifetime . . . .
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE MESSENGER IN THE CHURCH
+
+
+I
+
+The annual scourge of summer had descended pitilessly upon the city once
+more, enervating, depressing, stagnating, and people moved languidly in
+the penetrating heat that steamed from the pores of the surrounding river
+bottoms.
+
+The rector of St. John's realized that a crisis had come in his life,
+--a crisis he had tried to stave off in vain. And yet there was a period
+during which he pursued his shrunken duties as though nothing had
+happened to him; as a man who has been struck in battle keeps on, loath
+to examine, to acknowledge the gravity of his wound; fearing to, perhaps.
+Sometimes, as his mind went back to the merciless conflict of his past,
+his experience at the law school, it was the unchaining of that other man
+he dreaded, the man he believed himself to have finally subdued. But
+night and day he was haunted by the sorrowful and reproachful face of
+Truth.
+
+Had he the courage, now, to submit the beliefs which had sustained him
+all these years to Truth's inexorable inspection? Did he dare to turn
+and open those books which she had inspired,--the new philosophies, the
+historical criticisms which he had neglected and condemned, which he had
+flattered himself he could do without,--and read of the fruit of
+Knowledge? Twice, thrice he had hesitated on the steps of the big
+library, and turned away with a wildly beating heart.
+
+Day by day the storm increased, until from a cloud on the horizon it
+grew into a soul-shaking tempest. Profoundly moved Parr's he had been on
+that Sunday afternoon, in Eldon Parr's garden, he had resolutely resolved
+to thrust the woman and the incident from his mind, to defer the
+consideration of the questions she had raised--grave though they were--to
+a calmer period. For now he was unable to separate her, to eliminate the
+emotion--he was forced to acknowledge--the thought of her aroused, from
+the problems themselves. Who was she? At moments he seemed to see her
+shining, accusing, as Truth herself, and again as a Circe who had drawn
+him by subtle arts from his wanderings, luring him to his death; or, at
+other times, as the mutinous daughter of revolt. But when he felt, in
+memory, the warm touch of her hand, the old wildness of his nature
+responded, he ceased to speculate or care, and he longed only to crush
+and subdue her by the brute power of the man in him. For good or bad,
+she had woven her spell.
+
+Here was the old, elemental, twofold contest, carnal and spiritual,
+thoroughly revived! . . .
+
+He recalled, in his musings, the little theological school surrounded
+by southern woods and fields, where he had sometime walked under autumn
+foliage with the elderly gentleman who had had such an influence on his
+life--the dean. Mild-mannered and frail, patient in ordinary converse,
+--a lion for the faith. He would have died for it as cheerfully as any
+martyr in history. By the marvels of that faith Holder had beheld, from
+his pew in the chapel, the little man transformed. He knew young men,
+their perplexities and temptations, and he dealt with them personally,
+like a father. Holder's doubts were stilled, he had gained power of his
+temptations and peace for his soul, and he had gone forth inspired by the
+reminder that there was no student of whom the dean expected better
+things. Where now were the thousands of which he had dreamed, and which
+he was to have brought into the Church? . . .
+
+Now, he asked himself, was it the dean, or the dean's theology through
+which his regeneration had come? Might not the inherent goodness of the
+dean be one thing, and his theology quite another? Personality again!
+He recalled one of the many things which Alison Parr had branded on his
+memory,--"the belief, the authority in which the man is clothed, and not
+the man!" The dean's God had remained silent on the subject of
+personality. Or, at the best, he had not encouraged it; and there were
+--Hodder could not but perceive--certain contradictions in his character,
+which were an anomalistic blending of that of the jealous God of Moses
+and of the God of Christ. There must be continuity--God could not
+change. Therefore the God of infinite love must retain the wrath which
+visited sins of the fathers on the children, which demanded sacrifice,
+atonement,--an exact propitiation for his anger against mankind. An
+innocent life of sorrow and suffering!
+
+And again, "You and your religion are as far apart as the poles!" Had
+he, Hodder, outgrown the dean's religion, or had it ever been his own?
+Was there, after all, such a thing as religion? Might it not be merely a
+figment of the fertile imagination of man? He did not escape the terror
+of this thought when he paused to consider his labour of the past two
+years and the vanity of its results. And little by little the feeling
+grew upon him, such being the state of his mind, that he ought not to
+continue, for the present at least, to conduct the services. Should he
+resign, or go away for a while to some quiet place before he made such a
+momentous decision? There was no one to whom he could turn; no layman,
+and no clergyman; not even the old bishop, whom he had more than once
+mentally accused of being, too broad and too tolerant! No, he did not
+wish a clergyman's solution. The significance of this thought flashed
+through him--that the world itself was no longer seeking clergymen's
+solutions. He must go off alone, and submit his faith to the impartial
+test.
+
+It was in a vigil of the night, when he lay in the hot darkness, unable
+to sleep, that he came at length to this resolve. And now that he had
+cut the knot he was too just to blame Alison Parr for having pointed out
+--with what often had seemed a pitiless cruelty--something of which he
+had had a constantly growing perception yet had continually sought to
+evade. And he reviewed, as the church bells recorded the silent hours,
+how, little by little, his confidence had crumbled before the shocks of
+the successive revelations--some of them so slight that they had passed
+unnoticed: comparisons, inevitably compelled; Dalton Street; the
+confessions of Eleanor Goodrich and Mrs. Constable; Mr. Plimpton and his
+views of life--Eldon Parr! Even the slamming of the carriage doors in
+Burton Street had had a significance!
+
+Might it not prove that this woman had let fall into the turbid waters of
+his soul the drop that was to clear them forever? He would go away. He
+would not see her again.
+
+Over the sleeping city, unapprehended, stole the dawn.
+
+He arose, but instead of falling on his knees he went to the window and
+lifted his face to the whitening sky . . . . Slowly out of the
+obscurity of the earth's shadow emerged the vague outlines of familiar
+things until they stood sharply material, in a silence as of death. A
+sparrow twittered, and suddenly the familiar, soot-grimed roofs were
+bathed in light, and by a touch made beautiful . . . .
+
+Some hours later the city was wide awake. And Hodder, bathed and
+dressed, stood staring down from his study window into the street below,
+full now of young men and girls; some with set faces, hurrying, intent,
+others romping and laughing as they dodged the trucks and trolley cars;
+all on their way to the great shoe factory around the corner, the huge
+funnels of which were belching forth smoke into the morning air. The
+street emptied, a bell rang, a whistle blew, the hum of distant machinery
+began . . . .
+
+
+
+II
+
+Later that morning Hodder sat in his study. The shutters were closed,
+and the intensity of the tropical glare without was softened and diffused
+by the slanting green slats. His eye wandered over the long and
+comfortable room which had been his sanctuary in the feverish days of
+his ministry, resting affectionately on the hospitable chairs, the wide
+fireplace before which he had been wont to settle himself on winter
+nights, and even on the green matting--a cooling note in summer. And
+there, in the low cases along the walls, were the rows of his precious
+books,--his one hobby and extravagance. He had grown to love the room.
+Would he ever come back to it?
+
+A step sounded in the hall, a knock, and the well-known gaunt form and
+spectacled face of McCrae appeared in the doorway.
+
+"Ye wished to see me?" he asked.
+
+"McCrae," said the rector, "I am going off for a while."
+
+His assistant regarded him a moment in silence. Although Hodder had no
+intention of explaining his reasons, he had a curious conviction that it
+were superfluous to do so, that McCrae had guessed them.
+
+"Why shouldn't ye? There's but a handful left to preach to in this
+weather."
+
+"I wouldn't go, in this sudden way, if it were not imperative," Hodder
+added, trying to speak calmly.
+
+"Why shouldn't ye?" McCrae repeated, almost fiercely.
+
+Hodder smiled in spite of himself.
+
+"There's no reason," he said, "except the added work put on you without
+warning, and in this heat."
+
+"Ye'll not need to worry," his assistant assured him, "the heat's nothing
+to me." McCrae hesitated, and then demanded abruptly, "Ye'll not be
+visiting?"
+
+The question took Hodder by surprise.
+
+"No," he answered quickly, and not quite steadily, and hesitated in his
+turn, "I shan't be visiting."
+
+"It's a rest ye need, I've been wanting to say it." McCrae took a step
+forward, and for a moment it seemed as though he were at last about to
+break the bonds of his reserve. Perhaps he detected an instinctive
+shrinking on the rector's part. At any rate, there was another instant
+of silence, in which the two men faced each other across the desk, and
+McCrae held out his hand. "Good luck to ye," he said, as Hodder took it,
+"and don't have the pariah on your mind. Stay till ye're rested, and
+come back to us."
+
+He left the room abruptly. Hodder remained motionless, looking after
+him, and then, moved apparently by a sudden impulse, started toward the
+door,--only to halt and turn before he got to it. Almost he had opened
+his lips to call his assistant back. He could not do it--the moment had
+come and fled when it might have been possible. Did this man hide, under
+his brusqueness and brevity of speech, the fund of wisdom and the wider
+sympathy and understanding he suspected? Hodder could have vouched for
+it, and yet he had kept his own counsel. And he was struck suddenly by
+the significance of the fact, often remarked, that McCrae in his brief
+and common-sense and by no means enlivening sermons had never once
+referred in any way to doctrine or dogma!
+
+He spent half an hour in collecting and bestowing in two large valises
+such articles as his simple needs would demand, and then set out for a
+railroad office in the business portion of the city, where he bought his
+ticket and berth. Then, after a moment of irresolution on the threshold
+of the place, he turned to the right, thrusting his way through the
+sluggish crowds on Tower Street until he came to the large bookstore
+where he had been want to spend, from time to time, some of his leisure
+moments. A clerk recognized him, and was about to lead the way to the
+rear, where the precious editions were kept, when Hodder stopped him.
+
+In casting about for a beginning in his venture over unknown seas, there
+had naturally come into his mind three or four works which were anathema
+to the orthodox; one of which, in seven volumes, went back to his
+seminary days, and had been the subject of a ringing, denunciatory sermon
+by the dean himself. Three of them were by Germans of established
+reputations, another by a professor of the University of Paris. The
+habit of years is strong.
+
+And though he knew that many clergymen read these books, Hodder found it
+impossible to overcome a nervous sense of adventure,--nay (knowing his
+resolution), of apostasy, almost of clandestine guilt when he mentioned
+them. And it seemed to him that the face of the clerk betrayed surprise.
+One of the works was not in stock; he would send the others that
+afternoon. Mr. Hodder would take them? They made a formidable parcel,
+but a little handle was supplied and the rector hurried out, swinging
+himself on a Tower Street car.
+
+It must not be thought that the whole of what is called modern criticism
+was new to Hodder. This would indeed be too much of a reflection on the
+open-mindedness of the seminary from which he had graduated.
+But he found himself, now, pondering a little cynically on that
+"open-mindedness"; on that concession--if it had been a concession--to the
+methods of science. There had been in truth a course of lectures on this
+subject; but he saw now, very clearly, what a concerted effort had been
+put forward in the rest of the teaching to minimize and discredit it.
+Even the professor who gave the lectures had had the air of deploring
+them. Here it is, but on the whole one would better let it alone,--such
+was the inference. And he had let it alone, through all these years.
+
+In the seminary, too, volumes by semi-learned clergymen had been thrust
+into his hands, efforts which Hodder recalled now, in spite of his mental
+state, with a smile. These invariably championed the doctrine of the
+virgin birth as the pillar on which the Incarnation depended.
+A favourite argument declared that although the Gospel texts in regard to
+it might be proven untrustworthy, the miraculous birth must have happened
+anyway! And one of these clerical authors whom he had more recently
+read, actually had had the audacity to turn the weapons of the archenemy,
+science, back upon itself. The virgin birth was an established fact in
+nature, and had its place in the social economy of the bee. And did not
+parthenogenesis occur in the silk moth?
+
+In brief, the conclusion impressed upon him by his seminary instruction
+was this: that historical criticism had corrected some ideas and put
+some things in their right place. What these things were remained
+sufficiently vague. But whenever it attacked a cherished dogma it was,
+on general principles, wrong.
+
+Once again in his cool study, he cut the cord with a trembling hand, and
+while he was eating the lunch his housekeeper had prepared, dipped into
+one of the larger volumes. As he read again the critical disproofs he
+felt an acute, almost physical pain, as though a vital part of him were
+being cut away, as his mind dwelt upon those beautiful legends to which
+he had so often turned, and which had seemed the very fountain of his
+faith. Legends! . . . .
+
+He closed the book. The clock on the mantel struck three; his train was
+to leave at five. He rose and went down into the silent church he had
+grown to love, seating himself in one of the carved stalls of the choir,
+his eye lingering in turn on each beautiful object: on the glowing
+landscape in the window in memory of Eliza Parr, portraying the
+delectable country, with the bewildered yet enraptured faces of the
+pilgrims in the foreground; on the graceful, shining lectern, the
+aspiring arches, the carved marble altar behind the rail, and above
+it the painting of the Christ on the cross.
+
+The hours of greatest suffering are the empty hours. 'Eloi, Eloi, lama
+sabachthani?' The hours when the mysterious sustaining and driving force
+is withdrawn, and a lassitude and despair comes over us like that of a
+deserted child: the hours when we feel we have reached the limit of
+service, when our brief span of usefulness is done. Had God brought him,
+John Hodder, to the height of the powers of his manhood only to abandon
+him, to cast him adrift on the face of the waters--led him to this great
+parish, with all its opportunities, only that he might fail and flee?
+
+He sat staring at the face of the Man on the cross. Did he, in his
+overwrought state, imagine there an expression he had never before
+remarked, or had the unknown artist of the seventies actually risen above
+the mediocrity of the figure in his portrayal of the features of the
+Christ? The rector started, and stared again. There was no weakness in
+the face, no meekness, no suggestion of the conception of the sacrificed
+Lamb, no hint of a beatific vision of opening heavens--and yet no
+accusation, no despair. A knowing--that were nearer--a knowing of all
+things through the experiencing of all things, the suffering of all
+things. For suffering without revelation were vain, indeed! A perfected
+wisdom that blended inevitably with a transcendent love. Love and wisdom
+were one, then? To reach comprehension through conquering experience was
+to achieve the love that could exclaim, "they know not what they do!"
+
+Human or divine? Man or God? Hodder found himself inwardly repeating
+the words, the controversy which had raged for nineteen hundred years,
+and not yet was stilled. Perfection is divine. Human! Hodder repeated
+the word, as one groping on the threshold of a great discovery . . . .
+
+
+
+III
+
+He was listening--he had for a long time been listening to a sound which
+had seemed only the natural accompaniment of the drama taking place in
+his soul, as though some inspired organist were expressing in exquisite
+music the undercurrent of his agony. Only gradually did he become aware
+that it arose from the nave of the church, and, turning, his eyes fell
+upon the bowed head and shoulders of a woman kneeling in one of the pews.
+She was sobbing.
+
+His movement, he recalled afterward, did not come of a conscious
+volition, as he rose and descended the chancel steps and walked toward
+her; he stood for what seemed a long time on the white marble of the
+aisle looking down on her, his heart wrung by the violence of her grief,
+which at moments swept through her like a tempest. She seemed still
+young, but poverty had marked her with unmistakable signs. The white,
+blue-veined hands that clung to the railing of the pew were thin; and the
+shirtwaist, though clean, was cheap and frayed. At last she rose from
+her knees and raised a tear-stained face to his, staring at him in a dumb
+bewilderment.
+
+"Can I do anything for you?" he said gently, "I am the rector here."
+She did not answer, but continued to stare uncomprehendingly. He sat
+down beside her in the pew.
+
+"You are in trouble," he said. "Will you let me try to help you?"
+A sob shook her--the beginning of a new paroxysm. He waited patiently
+until it was over. Suddenly she got rather wildly and unsteadily to her
+feet.
+
+"I must go!" she cried. "Oh, God, what would I do if--if he wasn't
+there?"
+
+Hodder rose too. She had thrust herself past him into the aisle, but if
+he had not taken her arm she would have fallen. Thus they went together
+to the door of the church, and out into the white, burning sunlight. In
+spite of her weakness she seemed actually to be leading him, impelled by
+a strange force and fled down the steps of the porch to the sidewalk.
+And there she paused, seeing him still beside her. Fortunately he had
+his hat in his hand.
+
+"Where are you going?" she asked.
+
+"To take you home," he replied firmly, "you ought not to go alone."
+
+A look of something like terror came into her eyes.
+
+"Oh, no!" she protested, with a vehemence that surprised him. "I am
+strong. Oh, thank you, sir,--but I can go alone. It's Dicky--my little
+boy. I've never left him so long. I had gone for the medicine and I saw
+the church. I used to go to church, sir, before we had our troubles--and
+I just went in. It suddenly came over me that God might help me--the
+doctor can do nothing."
+
+"I will go with you," he said.
+
+She ceased to resist, as one submitting to the fatality of a superior
+will.
+
+The pavements that afternoon, as Hodder and the forlorn woman left the
+cool porticoes of St. John's, were like the floor of a stone oven, and
+the work horses wore little bonnets over their heads. Keeping to the
+shady side, the rector and his companion crossed Tower Street with its
+trolley cars and its awninged stores, and came to that depressing
+district which had reproached him since the first Sunday of his ministry
+when he had traversed it with Eldon Parr. They passed the once
+prosperous houses, the corner saloons pandering to two vices, decked with
+the flamboyant signs of the breweries. The trees were dying along the
+asphalt and in the yards, the iron fences broken here and there, the
+copings stained with rust and soot. Hodder's thoughts might have been
+likened to the heated air that simmered above the bricks.
+
+They were in Dalton Street! She seemed to have forgotten his presence,
+her pace quickened as she turned into a gate and flew up a flight of
+dirty stone steps, broken and sagging. Hodder took in, subconsciously,
+that the house was a dingy grey, of three stories and a Mansard roof,
+with a bay window on the yard side, and a fly-blown sign, "Rooms to Rent"
+hanging in one window. Across the street, on a lot that had once held a
+similar dignified residence, was the yellow brick building of the "Albert
+Hotel," and next door, on the east, a remodelled house of "apartments"
+with speaking tubes in the doorway.
+
+The woman led him up another flight of steps to the open door of
+the house, through a hallway covered with a ragged carpet, where a
+dilapidated walnut hat-rack stood, up the stairs, threading a dark
+passage that led into a low-ceiled, stifling room at the very back.
+A stout, slatternly person in a wrapper rose as they entered, but the
+mother cast herself down beside the lounge where the child was. Hodder
+had a moment of fear that she was indeed too late, so still the boy lay,
+so pathetically wan was the little face and wasted the form under the
+cotton nightgown. The mother passed her hand across his forehead.
+
+"Dicky!" she whispered fearfully, "Dicky!"
+
+He opened his eyes and smiled at her; feebly.
+
+The, stout woman, who had been looking on with that intensity of sympathy
+of which the poor are capable, began waving gently the palm-leaf fan.
+She was German.
+
+"He is so good, is Dicky. He smile at me when I fan him--once, twice.
+He complains not at all."
+
+The mother took the fan from her, hand.
+
+"Thank you for staying with him, Mrs. Breitmann. I was gone longer than
+I expected." The fact that the child still lived, that she was again in
+his presence, the absorbing act of caring for him seemed to have calmed
+her.
+
+"It is nothing, what I do," answered Mrs. Breitmann, and turned away
+reluctantly, the tears running on her cheeks. "When you go again, I come
+always, Mrs. Garvin. Ach!"
+
+Her exclamation was caused by the sight of the tall figure and black coat
+of the rector, and as she left the room, Mrs. Garvin turned. And he
+noticed in her eyes the same expression of dread they had held when she
+had protested against his coming.
+
+"Please don't think that I'm not thankful--" she faltered.
+
+"I am not offering you charity," he said. "Can you not take from other
+human beings what you have accepted from this woman who has just left?"
+
+"Oh, sir, it isn't that!" she cried, with a look of trust, of appeal that
+was new, "I would do anything--I will do anything. But my husband--he is
+so bitter against the church, against ministers! If he came home and
+found you here--"
+
+"I know--many people feel that way," he assented, "too many. But you
+cannot let a prejudice stand in the way of saving the boy's life, Mrs.
+Garvin."
+
+"It is more than that. If you knew, sir--"
+
+"Whatever it is," he interrupted, a little sternly, "it must not
+interfere. I will talk to your husband."
+
+She was silent, gazing at him now questioningly, yet with the dawning
+hope of one whose strength is all but gone, and who has found at last a
+stronger to lean upon.
+
+The rector took the fan from her arrested hand and began to ply it.
+
+"Listen, Mrs. Garvin. If you had come to the church half an hour later,
+I should have been leaving the city for a place far distant."
+
+"You were going away? You stayed on my account?"
+
+"I much prefer to stay, if I can be of any use, and I think I can. I am
+sure I can. What is the matter with the child?"
+
+"I don't know, sir--he just lies there listless and gets thinner and
+thinner and weaker and weaker. Sometimes he feels sick, but not often.
+The doctor don't seem to know."
+
+What doctor have you?"
+
+"His name is Welling. He's around the corner."
+
+"Exactly," said the rector. "This is a case for Dr. Jarvis, who is the
+best child specialist in the city. He is a friend of mine, and I intend
+to send for him at once. And the boy must go to a hospital--"
+
+"Oh, I couldn't, sir."
+
+He had a poignant realization of the agony behind the cry. She breathed
+quickly through her parted lips, and from the yearning in her tired eyes
+--as she gazed at the poor little form--he averted his glance.
+
+"Now, Mrs. Garvin, you must be sensible," he said. "This is no place for
+a sick child. And it is such a nice little hospital, the one I have in
+mind, and so many children get well and strong there," he added,
+cheerfully.
+
+"He wouldn't hear of it." Hodder comprehended that she was referring to
+her husband. She added inconsequently: "If I let him go, and he never
+came back! Oh, I couldn't do it--I couldn't."
+
+He saw that it was the part of wisdom not to press her, to give her time
+to become accustomed to the idea. Come back--to what? His eye wandered
+about the room, that bespoke the last shifts of poverty, for he knew that
+none but the desperate were driven to these Dalton Street houses, once
+the dwellings of the well-to-do, and all the more pitiful for the
+contrast. The heated air reeked with the smell of stale cooking.
+There was a gas stove at one side, a linoleum-covered table in the
+centre, littered with bottles, plates, and pitchers, a bed and chairs
+which had known better days, new obviously bruised and battered by many
+enforced movings. In one corner was huddled a little group of toys.
+
+He was suddenly and guiltily aware that the woman had followed his
+glance.
+
+"We had them in Alder Street," she said. "We might have been there yet,
+if we hadn't been foolish. It's a pretty street, sir--perhaps you know
+it--you take the Fanshawe Avenue cars to Sherman Heights. The air is
+like the country there, and all the houses are new, and Dicky had a yard
+to play in, and he used to be so healthy and happy in it. . . We were
+rich then,--not what you'd call rich," she added apologetically, "but we
+owned a little home with six rooms, and my husband had a good place as
+bookkeeper in a grocery house, and every year for ten years we put
+something by, and the boy came. We never knew how well off we were,
+until it was taken away from us, I guess. And then Richard--he's my
+husband--put his savings into a company--he thought it was so safe, and
+we were to get eight per cent--and the company failed, and he fell sick
+and lost his place, and we had to sell the house, and since he got well
+again he's been going around trying for something else. Oh, he's tried
+so hard,--every day, and all day long. You wouldn't believe it, sir.
+And he's so proud. He got a job as porter, but he wasn't able to hold
+it--he wasn't strong enough. That was in April. It almost broke my
+heart to see him getting shabby--he used to look so tidy. And folks
+don't want you when you're shabby." . . .
+
+There sprang to Hodder's mind a sentence in a book he had recently read:
+"Our slums became filled with sick who need never have been sick; with
+derelicts who need never have been abandoned."
+
+Suddenly, out of the suffocating stillness of the afternoon a woman's
+voice was heard singing a concert-hall air, accompanied by a piano played
+with vigour and abandon. And Hodder, following the sound, looked out
+across the grimy yard--to a window in the apartment house opposite.
+
+"There's that girl again," said the mother, lifting her head. "She does
+sing nice, and play, poor thing! There was a time when I wouldn't have
+wanted to listen. But Dicky liked it so . . . . It's the very tune
+he loved. He don't seem to hear it now. He don't even ask for Mr.
+Bentley any more."
+
+"Mr. Bentley?" the rector repeated. The name was somehow familiar to
+him.
+
+The piano and the song ceased abruptly, with a bang.
+
+"He lives up the street here a way--the kindest old gentleman you ever
+saw. He always has candy in his pockets for the children, and it's a
+sight to see them follow him up and down the sidewalk. He takes them to
+the Park in the cars on Saturday afternoons. That was all Dicky could
+think about at first--would he be well enough to go with Mr. Bentley by
+Saturday? And he was forever asking me to tell Mr. Bentley he was sick.
+I saw the old gentleman on the street to-day, and I almost went up to
+him. But I hadn't the courage."
+
+The child moaned, stirred, and opened his eyes, gazing at them
+feverishly, yet without seeming comprehension. She bent over him,
+calling his name . . . . Hodder thrust the fan into her hand, and
+rose.
+
+"I am going to telephone Dr. Jarvis," he said, "and then I shall come
+back, in order to be here when he arrives."
+
+She looked up at him.
+
+"Oh, thank you, sir,--I guess it's for the best--"
+
+Her voice died away, and the rector, seeking for the cause, saw that a
+man had entered the room. He walked up to the couch and stood for a
+moment staring moodily at the child, while the woman watched him,
+transfixed.
+
+"Richard!" she said.
+
+He paid no attention to her. She turned to Hodder. "This is my husband,
+sir. . . . Richard, I went into the church--just for a moment--I--I
+couldn't help it, and this gentleman--the minister--came home with me.
+He wanted to--he thought I was sick. And now he's going out to get the
+best doctor in the city for Dicky."
+
+The man turned suddenly and confronted the rector.
+
+"Why don't you let him die, you and your church people?" he asked.
+"You've done your worst to kill him."
+
+The woman put her hand fearfully, imploringly on the man's arm.
+
+"Richard!" she whispered.
+
+But as Hodder glanced from the derelict beside him a wave of
+comprehension passed through him that swept him clean of indignation,
+of resentment. And this man had been prosperous and happy!
+
+"There is but one way to save the boy's life, Mr. Garvin," he said, "and
+that is to put him in charge of Dr. Jarvis."
+
+The man made no reply, but went over to the window, staring out into the
+yard. There was something vaguely ominous in his attitude. The rector
+watched him a moment, and then turned to the mother.
+
+"You must not lose hope," he told her.
+
+She looked at him with terror-stricken eyes that sought to be grateful.
+He had picked up his hat from a corner of the littered table, and started
+to leave, when Garvin, by a sudden movement, planted himself in the
+doorway. Whether he had been drinking, or whether he were merely crazed
+by misfortune and the hopeless search in the heat for employment, and by
+lack of proper nourishment, Hodder could not say. There was a light in
+his eyes like that in a wounded animal's; and although he was thin and
+slight, he had the concentrated power of desperation.
+
+"Say, what church do you come from?" he demanded.
+
+"From St. John's," said the rector.
+
+"Eldon Parr's church?"
+
+Hodder started, in spite of himself, at the name.
+
+"Mr. Parr is a member of the congregation."
+
+"Come off! He owns it and runs it, the same as he does everything else
+in this town. Maybe you don't think I read the Sunday papers. Say, I
+was respectable once, and had a good place. You wouldn't believe it,
+would you?"
+
+Hodder hesitated. There was obviously no way to pass the man except by
+using physical force.
+
+"If you have anything to say to me, Mr. Garvin, I shall be glad to talk
+to you later. You must not stop me now," he said with a touch of
+severity.
+
+"You'll listen to me, right here and now," cried Garvin. "If you think I
+am going to let Eldon Parr's minister, or any one else belonging to him,
+save that boy's life, you've got another guess comin'. That's all. I'd
+rather have him die--d'ye hear? I'd rather have him die."
+
+The woman behind them whimpered . . . . The name was ringing like a
+knell in Hodder's head--Eldon Parr! Coming, as it had, like a curse from
+the lips of this wretched, half-demented creature, it filled his soul
+with dismay. And the accusation had in it the profound ring of truth.
+He was Eldon Parr's minister, and it was Eldon Parr who stood between him
+and his opportunity.
+
+"Why do you speak of Mr. Parr?" he asked, though the question cost him a
+supreme effort.
+
+"Why do I speak of him? My God, because he ruined me. If it hadn't been
+for him, damn him, I'd have a home, and health and happiness to-day, and
+the boy would be well and strong instead of lying there with the life all
+but gone out of him. Eldon Parr did for me, and now he's murdered my
+son--that's why I mention him."
+
+In the sudden intensity of his feeling, Hodder seized Garvin by the arms
+--arms that were little more than skin and bone. The man might be
+crazed, he might be drunk: that he believed what he was saying there
+could be no question. He began to struggle violently, but the rector was
+strong.
+
+"Be still," he commanded. And suddenly, overcome less by the physical
+power than by the aspect of the clergyman, an expression of bewilderment
+came into his eyes, and he was quiet. Hodder dropped his arms. "I do
+not intend to go until I hear what you have to say. It would be useless,
+at any rate, since your child's life is at stake. Tell me how Mr. Parr
+has ruined you."
+
+Garvin stared at him, half in suspicion, half in amazement.
+
+"I guess you never knew of his ruining anybody, did you?" he demanded
+sullenly. "Well, I'll tell you all right, and you can go and tell him.
+He won't care much--he's used to it by this time, and he gets square with
+God by his churches and charities. Did you ever hear of a stock called
+Consolidated Tractions?"
+
+Consolidated Tractions! In contrast to the sordid misery and degradation
+of this last refuge of the desperate Hodder saw the lofty, panelled
+smoking room at Francis Ferguson's, and was listening again to Wallis
+Plimpton's cynical amusement as to how he and Everett Constable and Eldon
+Parr himself had "gat out" before the crash; "got out" with all the money
+of the wretch who now stood before him! His parishioners! his
+Christians! Oh God!
+
+The man was speaking in his shrill voice.
+
+"Well, I was a Traction sucker, all right, and I guess you wouldn't have
+to walk more than two blocks to find another in this neighbourhood. You
+think Eldon Parr's a big, noble man, don't you? You're proud to run his
+church, ain't you? You wouldn't believe there was a time when I thought
+he was a big man, when I was kind of proud to live in the same city with
+him. She'll tell you how I used to come home from the store and talk
+about him after supper, and hope that the kid there would grow up into a
+financier like Eldon Parr. The boys at the store talked about him: he
+sort of laid hold on our imaginations with the library he gave, and
+Elmwood Park, and the picture of the big organ in your church in the
+newspapers--and sometimes, Mary and me and the boy, in the baby carriage,
+on Sunday afternoons we used to walk around by his house, just to look at
+it. You couldn't have got me to believe that Eldon Parr would put his
+name to anything that wasn't straight.
+
+"Then Consolidated Tractions came along, with Parr's, name behind it.
+Everybody was talking about it, and how it was payin' eight per cent.
+from the start, and extra dividends and all, and what a marvel of finance
+it was. Before the kid came, as soon as I married her, we began to save
+up for him. We didn't go to the theatres or nothing. Well, I put it
+all, five thousand dollars, into Consolidated. She'll tell you how we
+sat up half the night after we got the first dividend talking about how
+we'd send the kid to college, and after we went to bed we couldn't sleep.
+It wasn't more than a year after that we began to hear things--and we
+couldn't sleep for sure, and the dividends stopped and the stock tumbled.
+Even then I wouldn't believe it of him, that he'd take poor people's
+money that way when he had more than he knew what to do with. I made up
+my mind if I went down to see him and told him about it, he'd make it
+right. I asked the boss for an hour off, and headed for the Parr
+building--I've been there as much as fifty times since--but he don't
+bother with small fry. The clerks laugh when they see me comin' . . .
+I got sick worryin', and when I was strong enough to be around they'd
+filled my job at the grocery, and it wasn't long before we had to move
+out of our little home in Alder Street. We've been movin' ever since,"
+he cried, and tears of weakness were in his eyes, "until we've come to
+this, and we'll have to get out of here in another week. God knows where
+we'll go then."
+
+Hodder shuddered.
+
+"Then I found out how he done it--from a lawyer. The lawyer laughed at
+me, too. Say, do you wonder I ain't got much use for your church people?
+Parr got a corporation lawyer named Langmaid--he's another one of your
+millionnaire crooks--to fix it up and get around the law and keep him out
+of jail. And then they had to settle with Tim Beatty for something like
+three hundred thousand. You know who Beatty is--he owns this city--his
+saloon's around here on Elm Street. All the crooks had to be squared.
+Say," he demanded aggressively, "are Parr and Langmaid any better than
+Beatty, or any of the hold-up men Beatty covers? There's a street-walker
+over there in those flats that's got a million times more chance to get
+to heaven--if there is any--than those financiers, as they call 'emselves
+--I ain't much on high finance, but I've got some respect for a second
+story man now--he takes some risks! I'll tell you what they did, they
+bought up the short car lines that didn't pay and sold 'em to themselves
+for fifty times as much as they were worth; and they got controlling
+interests in the big lines and leased 'em to themselves with dividends
+guaranteed as high as eighteen per cent. They capitalized the
+Consolidated for more millions than a little man like me can think of,
+and we handed 'em our money because we thought they were honest. We
+thought the men who listed the stock on the Exchange were honest. And
+when the crash came, they'd got away with the swag, like any common
+housebreakers. There were dummy directors, and a dummy president. Eldon
+Parr didn't have a share--sold out everything when she went over two
+hundred, but you bet he kept his stock in the leased lines, which
+guarantee more than they earn. He cleaned up five million, they say....
+My money--the money that might give that boy fresh air, and good doctors
+....Say, you believe in hell, don't you? You tell Eldon Parr to keep his
+charity,--he can't send any of it in here. And you'd better go back to
+that church of his and pray to keep his soul out of hell." . . .
+
+His voice, which had risen even to a higher pitch, fell silent. And all
+at once, without warning, Garvin sank, or rather tumbled upon the bed,
+sobbing in a way that was terrible to see. The wife stole across the
+room, sat down beside him, and laid her hand on his shoulder. . . .
+
+In spite of the intensity of his own anguish, Hodder was conscious of a
+curious detachment; and for months afterward particular smells, the sight
+of a gasoline stove, a certain popular tune gave him a sharp twinge of
+pain. The acid distilling in his soul etched the scene, the sounds, the
+odours forever in his memory: a stale hot wind from the alley rattled the
+shutter-slats, and blew the door to; the child stirred; and above the
+strident, irregular weeping rose main, in ironical contrast, the piano
+and the voice across the yard. In that glimpse he had into the heart of
+life's terrible mystery he momentarily understood many things: he knew
+that behind the abandon of the woman's song was the same terror which
+reigned in the room in which he stood . . . .
+
+There were voices in the passageway without, a woman saying in a German
+accent,--"It is here, sir."
+
+There was a knock at the door . . . .
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE LOST PARISHIONER
+
+
+I
+
+Hodder opened the door. In the dingy passageway he perceived a tall
+figure which immediately turned out to be that of an old gentleman. In
+spite of the heat, he wore a long coat and an old-fashioned, high collar,
+a black tie, under which was exposed a triangle of immaculate, pleated
+linen. In one hand he held a gold-headed stick, a large tall hat of
+which the silk nap was a little rubbed, a string sustaining a parcel, the
+brown paper wrapping of which was soaked: in the other, a manila bag
+containing lemons.
+
+His head was bent forward a little, the high dome of it was bald,
+but the white hair clustered thickly behind the temples. The face was
+clean-shaven, the cheeks touched with red, the nose high and dominating,
+distinctly philanthropic. And the blue eyes rested on the clergyman with
+a benevolence unfeigned.
+
+"Good afternoon, sir," the old gentleman said; "I am told Mrs. Garvin
+lives here."
+
+Before the rector could reply Mrs. Garvin herself stood between them.
+
+"It's Mr. Bentley!" she exclaimed.
+
+"I fear I'm intruding, ma'am," he said. "But some of Dicky's little
+friends have just informed me that he is ill, and I have taken the
+liberty of calling to inquire."
+
+Mr. Bentley entered the room,--simple words to express that which was
+in some sort an event. He laid his parcels on the table, his hat and
+stick on a chair, and stood looking down in silence at the thin little
+form on the couch. Presently he turned.
+
+"I'm afraid he's very ill, ma'am," he said gently. "You have your own
+doctor, no doubt. But if you will permit me, as a friend, to make a
+suggestion, we have in the city one of the best child specialists in the
+United States, who is never weary of curing these little ones,--Dr.
+Jarvis, and I shall be happy to ask him to come and see Dicky."
+
+Mrs. Garvin glanced at Hodder, who came forward.
+
+"I was just about to telephone for Dr. Jarvis, Mr. Bentley, when you
+arrived. I am Mr. Hodder, of St. John's."
+
+"How do you do, sir?" The kindly eyes, alight with a gentle flame, rested
+upon the rugged figure of the rector. "I am glad that you, too, agree
+that Dr. Jarvis is advisable, Mr. Hodder."
+
+There was a sound from the bed. Garvin had got to his feet and was
+staring wildly, with reddened lids.
+
+"Are you Horace Bentley?" he demanded.
+
+"That is my name, sir," Mr. Bentley replied. His expression of surprise
+was only momentary. And in all his life Hodder had never beheld a
+greater contrast in human beings than between that gracious and courtly
+old man and the haggard, unkempt, unshaved, and starving outcast facing
+him. Something like a film came over Garvin's eyes.
+
+"He ruined you, too, twenty years back--Eldon Parr did for you, too. Oh,
+I know his record, I've followed his trail--he got all the Grantham stock
+that would have made you a millionnaire!"
+
+"Ah," replied Mr. Bentley, smiling to humour him, "that's something I
+have no wish to be, sir,--a millionaire." He met the frightened gaze of
+the wife. "Good day, ma'am. If you will allow me, I'll come to-morrow
+morning to learn what Dr. Jarvis will have had to say. Have courage,
+ma'am, have courage. You may have faith in Dr. Jarvis."
+
+The poor woman was incapable of speech. Mr. Bentley picked up his hat
+and stick.
+
+"I've taken the liberty of bringing Dicky a little ice and a few lemons."
+His eyes rested again on the couch by the window. Then he turned to
+Garvin, who stood mutely, staring. "Good evening, sir," he said.
+"We must look for the best."
+
+
+
+II
+
+They went down the stairs of the shabby and battered house, stairs by the
+side of which holes had been knocked through the faded wall-paper--scars
+of frequent movings. The sound and smell of frying came out of the open
+door of what once had been the parlour, and on the front steps a little
+girl darted past them with a pitcher of beer. When they reached the
+sidewalk Mr. Bentley halted.
+
+"If you were intending to telephone Dr. Jarvis, Mr. Hodder, there is a
+public station in the drug store just above here. I know that clergymen
+are busy persons, and I am passing it, if you are pressed for time."
+
+"My only concern is to get Jarvis here," said the rector.
+"If I may go with you--"
+
+Once again in the hot sunlight, reaction had set in. Hodder was suddenly
+unstrung, and the kindly old gentleman beside him seemed for the instant
+the only fixture in a chaotic universe. It was not until later
+reflection that he realized Mr. Bentley might, by an intuitive sympathy,
+a depth of understanding, have drained something of his state, since the
+incidents which followed were to be accounted for on no other grounds.
+In such elemental moments the frail conventions are swept away: Mr.
+Bentley, whoever he might be, was no longer a stranger; and it seemed
+wholly natural to be walking with him up the street, to hear him saying,
+--not with perfunctory politeness but in a tone that was itself an
+invitation,--"With pleasure, sir, we'll go together. And let us trust
+that the doctor will be at home."
+
+Nor did Hodder stop to wonder, then, why Mr. Bentley should have sought
+in his conversation to dissipate something of the hideous blackness of a
+tragedy which must have moved him profoundly. How fortunate, he
+declared, that they should have arrived before it was too late! For
+it was plain to be seen that these Garvins were good people who had been
+broken by adversity . . . . The boy had struck him particularly--a
+lovable, merry little fellow whose clothes, Mr. Bentley observed, were
+always neatly mended, betokening a mother with self-respect and
+character. He even spoke of Garvin: adversity, worry, the heat, constant
+brooding over a happier past and an uncertain future--was it surprising
+that the poor man's mind had become unhinged? They must make some plan
+for Garvin, said Mr. Bentley, get the man and his wife into the country
+for a while amongst kindly people. This might no doubt be arranged....
+
+"Here we are, sir."
+
+The familiar smell of drugs, the sound of the trickling water in the soda
+fountain roused Hodder to reality, to action, and he hurried into the
+telephone booth, fumbled in the dog-eared book, got Dr. Jarvis's number
+and called it. An eternity seemed to elapse before he had a reply, heard
+his coin jangling in the bog, recognized the voice of the great doctor's
+secretary. Yes, the doctor was in would he speak to Mr. Hodder, of St.
+John's? . . . An interval, during which Hodder was suddenly struck
+with this designation of himself. Was he still of St. John's, then? An
+aeon might have elapsed since he had walked down the white marble of its
+aisle toward the crouching figure in the pew. He was not that man, but
+another--and still Mr. Hodder, of St. John's. . . . Then he heard the
+specialist say, "Hello, Mr. Hodder, what can I do for you?" Heard his
+own voice in reply, explaining the case. Could the doctor find time?
+The doctor could: he was never too busy to attend to the poor,--though he
+did not say so: he would be there--by half-past six. The rector hung up
+the receiver, opened the door of the booth and mopped his brow, for the
+heat was stifling.
+
+"The doctor will go," he explained in answer to Mr. Bentley's inquiring
+look.
+
+"Now, sir," said the old gentleman, when they were out of the store, "we
+have done all that we can for the time being. I do not live far from
+here. Perhaps you would give me the pleasure of taking supper with me,
+if you have no other engagement."
+
+No other engagement! Not until then did Hodder remember his empty rooms
+in the parish house, and the train which was to have borne him away from
+all this already speeding northward. He accepted gratefully, nor did he
+pause to speculate upon the mystery by which the stream of his life
+seemed so suddenly to have been diverted. He had, indeed, no sense of
+mystery in the presence of this splendidly sane, serene old man, any more
+than the children who ran after him from the dingy yards and passages,
+calling his name, clinging to the skirts of his coat. These accepted
+him simply as an anomalous fact in their universe, grinned at his
+pleasantries, and held up grimy little hands for the kidney-shaped candy
+beans he drew forth from his capacious pockets. In the intervals he
+reminisced to the rector about the neighbourhood.
+
+"It seems but a short while ago when the trees met overhead--magnificent
+trees they were. The asphalt and the soot killed them. And there were
+fruit trees in that yard"--he pointed with his stick to a littered sun
+parched plot adjoining a battered mansion--"all pink and white with
+blossoms in the spring. Mr. Hadley lived there--one of our forgotten
+citizens. He is dead and gone now and his family scattered. That other
+house, where the boy lies, belonged to Mr. Villars, a relation of the
+Atterbury family, and I can recall very well a little girl with a pink
+sash and a white dress who used to come running out to meet me with
+flowers in her hands. Incredible as it may seem, she picked them in that
+yard. I thought of her as I went in, how fresh and happy she used to be,
+and what a different place this was for children then. She must have
+some of her own by this time."
+
+The character of the street had changed to what might be called
+shabby-genteel, and they stopped before a three-story brick house--one
+of a row--that showed signs of scrupulous care. The steps were newly
+scrubbed, the woodwork neatly painted.
+
+"This is where I live, sir," said Mr. Bentley, opening the door with a
+latchkey and leading the way into a high room on the right, darkened and
+cool, and filled with superb, old-fashioned rosewood furniture. It was
+fitted up as a library, with tall shelves reaching almost to the ceiling.
+
+An old negro appeared, dressed in a swallow-tailed coat. His hair was as
+white as his master's, and his face creased with age.
+
+"Sam," said Mr. Bentley, "I have brought home a gentleman for supper."
+
+"Yassah, Misteh Ho'ace. I was jest agwine to open up de blin's."
+
+He lifted the wire screens and flung back the shutters, beamed
+on the rector as he relieved him of his hat, and noiselessly retired.
+Curiosity, hitherto suppressed by more powerful feelings, awoke in Hodder
+speculations which ordinarily would have been aroused before: every
+object in the room bespoke gentility, was eloquent of a day when wealth
+was honoured and respected: photographs, daguerreotypes in old-fashioned
+frames bore evidence of friendships of the past, and over the marble
+mantel hung a portrait of a sweet-faced woman in the costume of the
+thirties, whose eyes reminded Hodder of Mr. Bentley's. Who was she?
+
+Hodder wondered. Presently he found himself before a photograph on the
+wall beyond, at which he had been staring unconsciously.
+
+"Ah, you recognize it," said Mr. Bentley.
+
+"St. John's!"
+
+"Yes," Mr. Bentley repeated, "St. John's." He smiled at Hodder's glance
+of bewilderment, and put his hand on the younger man's arm. "That
+picture was taken before you were born, sir, I venture to say--in 1869.
+I am very fond of it, for it gives the church in perspective, as you see.
+That was Mr. Gore's house"--he indicated a square, heavily corniced
+mansion--"where the hotel now stands, and that was his garden, next the
+church, where you see the trees above the wall."
+
+The rector turned again and looked at his host, who, was gazing at the
+picture thoughtfully.
+
+"I ought to have remembered," he said. "I have seen your name in the
+church records, sir, and I have heard Mr. Waring speak of you."
+
+"My dear Mr. Hodder, there is no reason why you should have known me.
+A great many years have passed since I was a parishioner of St. John's
+--a great many years."
+
+"But it was you," the rector began, uncertainly, and suddenly spoke with
+conviction, "it was you who chose the architect, who did more than other
+men to make the church what it is."
+
+"Whatever I may have done," replied Mr. Bentley, with simple dignity,
+"has brought its reward. To this day I have not ceased to derive
+pleasure from it, and often I go out of my way, through Burton Street,
+although the view is cramped. And sometimes," he added, with the hint of
+a twinkle in his eye, "I go in. This afternoon is not the first time I
+have seen you, Mr. Hodder."
+
+"But--?" said the rector. He stared at the other's face, and the
+question died on his lips.
+
+"You wonder why I am no longer a parishioner. The time came when
+I could not afford to be." There was no hint of reproach in his voice,
+of bitterness. He spoke regretfully, indeed, but as one stating an
+incontrovertible fact. "I lost my fortune, I could not keep my pew,
+so I deeded it back to the church. My old friends, Mrs. Dimock and Asa
+Waring, and others, too, were very kind. But I could not accept their
+hospitality."
+
+Hodder bowed his head in silence. What thundered indictment of the
+Church of Christ could have been as severe, as wholly condemning as these
+few words so dispassionately uttered by the man beside him?
+
+The old darky entered, and announced supper.
+
+Hodder had lost his way, yet a hand had been held out to him, and he
+seized it. With a sense of being led, psychically as well as physically,
+he followed Mr. Bentley into a large bedroom, where a high, four-posted
+bed lifted a pleated canopy toward the ceiling. And after he had washed
+his hands they entered a dining-room looking out upon a little yard in
+the rear, which had been transformed into a garden. Roses, morning
+glories, and nasturtiums were growing against the walls; a hose lay
+coiled upon the path; the bricks, baked during the day, were splashed
+with water; the leaves and petals were wet, and the acrid odour of moist
+earth, mingling with perfumes, penetrated the room. Hodder paused in the
+window.
+
+"Sam keeps our flowers alive," he heard Mr. Bentley say, "I don't know
+how."
+
+"I scrubs 'em, sah," said Sam. "Yassah, I washes 'em like chilluns."
+
+He found himself, at Mr. Bentley's request, asking grace, the old darky
+with reverently bent head standing behind his master; sitting down at a
+mahogany table that reflected like a mirror the few pieces of old silver,
+to a supper of beaten biscuits that burned one's fingers, of 'broiled
+chicken and coffee, and sliced peaches and cream. Mr. Bentley was
+talking of other days--not so long gone by when the great city had been a
+village, or scarcely more. The furniture, it seemed, had come from his
+own house in what was called the Wilderness Road, not far from the river
+banks, over the site of which limited trains now rolled on their way
+eastward toward the northernmost of the city's bridges. He mentioned
+many names, some remembered, some forgotten, like his own; dwelt on
+pleasures and customs gone by forever.
+
+"A little while after I moved in here, I found that one old man could not
+fill the whole of this house, so I let the upper floors," he explained,
+smilingly. "Some day I must introduce you to my tenants, Mr. Hodder."
+
+By degrees, as Hodder listened, he became calm. Like a child, he found
+himself distracted, talking, asking questions: and the intervals grew
+longer between the recurrent surges of fear when the memory rose before
+him of the events of the day,--of the woman, the child, and the man: of
+Eldon Parr and this deed he had done; hinting, as it did, of closed
+chambers of other deeds yet to be opened, of countless, hidden miseries
+still to be revealed: when he heard once more the tortured voice of the
+banker, and the question: "How would you like to live in this house
+--alone?" In contrast, now he beheld the peace in the face of the man
+whose worldly goods Eldon Parr had taken, and whom he had driven out of
+the church. Surely, this man had found a solution! . . . What was it?
+
+Hodder thought of the child, of the verdict of Dr. Jarvis, but he
+lingered on, loth to leave,--if the truth be told--afraid to leave;
+drawing strength from his host's calm, wondering as to the source of it,
+as to the life which was its expression; longing, yet not presuming, to
+question. The twilight deepened, and the old darky lit a lamp and led
+the way back to the library.
+
+"Sam," said Mr. Bentley, "draw up the armchair for Mr. Hodder beside the
+window. It is cooler there."
+
+"I ought to go," Hodder said. "I ought to see how the child is. Jarvis
+will have been there by this time, and there may be necessaries--"
+
+"Jarvis will have attended to that," Mr. Bentley replied. "Sit down, Mr.
+Hodder. I am not sure that, for the present, we have not done all in
+this case that is humanly possible."
+
+"You mean," said the rector, "that they will accept nothing from me."
+It came from him, spontaneously, like a cry. He had not meant to say it.
+"I don't blame them. I don't blame them for losing their faith in God
+and man, in the Church. I ought to have seen it before, but I was blind,
+incredibly blind--until it struck me in the face. You saw it, sir, and
+you left a church from which the poor are thrust out, which refuses to
+heed the first precept of its Master."
+
+"I saw it," answered Mr. Bentley, "but I could do nothing. Perhaps you
+can do--something."
+
+"Ah!" Hodder exclaimed sharply, "why do you say that? The Church is
+paralyzed, chained. How can she reach these wretched people who are the
+victims of the ruthless individualism and greed of those who control her?
+You know--that man, Mr. Bentley." (Hodder could not bring himself to
+pronounce Eldon Parr's name.) "I had an affection for him, I pitied him,
+because he suffers--"
+
+"Yes," echoed Mr. Bentley, "he suffers."
+
+Hodder was momentarily arrested by the sadness of his tone.
+
+"But he doesn't know why he suffers--he cannot be made to see," the
+rector went on. "And he is making others suffer,--hideously, while he
+imagines himself a Christian. He is the Church to that miserable,
+hopeless wretch we saw to-day, and to hundreds of the same kind whom he
+has driven to desperation. And I--who am supposed to be the vicar of
+God--I am powerless. They have a contempt for me, a just contempt. They
+thrust me out of their doors, bid me to return and minister to their
+oppressors. You were right to leave, and I should have left long since."
+
+He had not spoken with violence, or with a lack of control. He seemed
+rather to have regained a mastery of himself, and felt as a man from whom
+the shackles have been struck, proclaiming his freedom. Mr. Bentley's
+eyes lighted in involuntary response as he gazed at the figure and face
+before him. He pressed his hands together.
+
+"If you will forgive a curiosity, Mr. Hodder, that is somewhat due to my
+interest in a church with which I have many precious associations, may I
+ask if this is a sudden determination on your part?"
+
+"No," Hodder said. "I have known ever since I came here that something
+was wrong, but at first I couldn't see it, and after that I wouldn't see
+it. That is about what happened, as I look back on it.
+
+"But the farther in I went," Hodder continued, "the more tangled and
+bewildered I became. I was hypnotized, I think," he added with a
+gesture,--"hypnotized, as a man is who never takes his eyes from a
+pattern. I wanted to get at this neighbourhood--Dalton Street--I mean,
+and finally I agreed to the establishment of a settlement house over
+here, to be paid for largely by Eldon Parr and Francis Ferguson. I
+couldn't see the folly of such an undertaking--the supreme irony of it,
+until--until it was pointed out to me." He hesitated; the remembrance of
+Alison Parr ran through him, a thread of pain. "And even then I tried to
+dodge the issue, I tried to make myself believe that good might flow out
+of evil; that the Church, which is supposed to be founded on the highest
+ideal ever presented to man, might compromise and be practical, that
+she might accept money which had been wrung from a trusting public by
+extortion, by thinly disguised thievery such as this Consolidated
+Tractions Company fraud, and do good with it! And at last I made up
+my mind to go away, to-day, to a quiet place where I might be alone,
+and reflect, when by a singular circumstance I was brought into contact
+with this man, Garvin. I see now, clearly enough, that if I had gone,
+I should never have come back."
+
+"And you still intend to go?" Mr. Bentley asked.
+
+Hodder leaned his elbow against the mantel. The lamplight had a curious
+effect on Mr. Bentley's face.
+
+"What can I do?" he demanded. The question was not aimed directly at his
+host--it was in the nature of a renewed appeal to a tribunal which had
+been mute, but with which he now seemed vaguely aware of a certain
+contact. "Even supposing I could bring myself to accept the compromise
+--now that I see it clearly, that the end justifies the means--what good
+could I accomplish? You saw what happened this afternoon--the man would
+have driven me out if, it hadn't been for you. This whole conception of
+charity is a crime against civilization--I had to have that pointed out
+to me, too,--this system of legalized or semi-legalized robbery and the
+distribution of largesse to the victims. The Church is doing wrong,
+is stultifying herself in encouraging it. She should set her face
+rigidly against it, stand for morality and justice and Christianity in
+government, not for pauperizing. It is her mission to enlighten these
+people, all people--to make them self-respecting, to give them some
+notion of the dignity of their souls and their rights before God and
+man."
+
+"Aren't you yourself suggesting," said Mr. Bentley, "the course which
+will permit you to remain?"
+
+Hodder was silent. The thought struck him with tremendous force. Had he
+suggested it? And how--why? Could it be done? Could he do it or begin
+it?
+
+"We have met at last in a singular way," he heard Mr. Bentley going on,
+"in a way that has brushed aside the conventions, in a way--I am happy to
+say--that has enabled you to give me your confidence. And I am an old
+man,--that has made it easier. I saw this afternoon, Mr. Hodder, that
+you were troubled, although you tried to hide it."
+
+"I knew that you saw it," Hodder said.
+
+"Nor was it difficult for me to guess something of the cause of it. The
+same thing has troubled me."
+
+"You?"
+
+"Yes," Mr. Bentley answered. "I left St. John's, but the habits and
+affections of a lifetime are not easily severed. And some time before
+I left it I began to have visions of a future for it. There was a
+question, many years ago, as to whether a new St. John's should not be
+built in the West End, on a site convenient to the parishioners, and this
+removal I opposed. Mr. Waring stood by me. We foresaw the day when
+this district would be--what it is now--the precarious refuge of the
+unfortunate in the battle of life, of just such unhappy families as the
+Garvins, of miserable women who sell themselves to keep alive. I thought
+of St. John's, as you did, as an oasis in a desert of misery and vice.
+At that time I, too, believed in the system of charities which you have
+so well characterized as pauperizing."
+
+"And now?"
+
+Mr. Bentley smiled, as at a reminiscence.
+
+"My eyes were opened," he replied, and in these simple words summed up
+and condemned it all. "They are craving bread, and we fling them atones.
+I came here. It was a house I owned, which I saved from the wrecks, and
+as I look back upon what the world would call a misfortune, sir, I can
+see that it was a propitious event, for me. The street 'ran down,'
+as the saying goes. I grew gradually to know these people, my new
+neighbours, largely through their children, and I perceived many things
+I had not dreamed of--before then. I saw how the Church was hampered,
+fettered; I saw why they disliked and distrusted it."
+
+"And yet you still believed that it had a mission?" Hodder interrupted.
+He had been listening with rapt attention.
+
+"I still believed it," said Mr. Bentley. "My conception of that mission
+changed, grew, and yet it seemed further and further from fulfilment.
+And then you came to St. John's."
+
+"I!" The cry was involuntary.
+
+"You," Mr. Bentley repeated. "Sometimes," he added whimsically, "I go
+there, as I have told you. I saw you, I heard you preach. I talked to
+my friend Waring about you. I saw that your eyes were not opened, but I
+think I had a certain presentiment, for which I do not pretend to
+account, that they would be opened."
+
+"You mean," said the rector, "that if I believe in the mission of the
+Church as I have partially stated it here tonight, I--should stay and
+fight for it."
+
+"Precisely," Mr. Bentley replied.
+
+There was a note of enthusiasm, almost of militancy in the old
+gentleman's tone that surprised and agitated Hodder. He took a turn
+up and down the room before he answered.
+
+"I ought to tell you that the view I expressed a moment ago is new to me.
+I had not thought of it before, and it is absolutely at variance with any
+previous ideas I have held. I can see that it must involve, if carried
+to its logical conclusion, a change in the conception of Christianity I
+have hitherto held."
+
+He was too intent upon following up the thought to notice Mr. Bentley's
+expression of assent.
+
+"And suppose," he asked, "I were unable to come to any conclusion?
+I will be frank, Mr. Bentley, and confess to you that at present I cannot
+see my way. You have heard me preach--you know what my beliefs have
+been. They are shattered. And, while I feel that there is some definite
+connection between the view of the Church which I mentioned and her
+message to the individual, I do not perceive it clearly. I am not
+prepared at present to be the advocate of Christianity, because I do
+not know what Christianity is. I thought I knew.
+
+"I shall have to begin all over again, as though I had never taken
+orders, submit to a thorough test, examine the evidence impartially. It
+is the only way. Of this much I am sure, that the Church as a whole has
+been engaged in a senseless conflict with science and progressive
+thought, that she has insisted upon the acceptance of facts which are in
+violation of reason and which have nothing to do with religion. She has
+taught them to me--made them, in fact, a part of me. I have clung to
+them as long as I can, and in throwing them over I don't know where I
+shall land."
+
+His voice was measured, his words chosen, yet they expressed a withering
+indignation and contempt which were plainly the culmination of months of
+bewilderment--now replaced by a clear-cut determination.
+
+"I do not blame any individual," he continued, "but the system by which
+clergymen are educated.
+
+"I intend to stay here, now, without conducting any services, and find
+out for myself what the conditions are here in Dalton Street. You know
+those people, Mr. Bentley, you understand them, and I am going to ask you
+to help me. You have evidently solved the problem."
+
+Mr. Bentley rose. And he laid a hand, which was not quite steady, on the
+rector's shoulder.
+
+"Believe me, sir," he replied, "I appreciate something of what such a
+course must mean to you--a clergyman." He paused, and a look came upon
+his face, a look that might scarce have been called a smile--Hodder
+remembered it as a glow--reminiscent of many things. In it a life was
+summed ups in it understanding, beneficence, charity, sympathy, were all
+expressed, yet seemingly blended into one. "I do not know what my
+testimony may be worth to you, my friend, but I give it freely. I
+sometimes think I have been peculiarly fortunate. But I have lived a
+great many years, and the older I get and the more I see of human nature
+the firmer has grown my conviction of its essential nobility and
+goodness."
+
+Hodder marvelled, and was silent.
+
+"You will come here, often,--every day if you can. There are many men
+and women, friends of mine, whom I should like you to know, who would
+like to know you."
+
+"I will, and thank you," Hodder answered. Words were inadequate for the
+occasion . . . .
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE WOMAN OF THE SONG
+
+On leaving Mr. Bentley, Hodder went slowly down Dalton Street, wondering
+that mere contact with another human being should have given him the
+resolution to turn his face once again toward the house whither he was
+bound. And this man had given him something more. It might hardly have
+been called faith; a new courage to fare forth across the Unknown--that
+was it; hope, faint but revived.
+
+Presently he stopped on the sidewalk, looked around him, and read a sign
+in glaring, electric letters, Hotel Albert. Despite the heat, the place
+was ablaze with lights. Men and women were passing, pausing--going in.
+A motor, with a liveried chauffeur whom he remembered having seen before,
+was standing in front of the Rathskeller. The nightly carousal was
+beginning.
+
+Hodder retraced his steps, crossed the street diagonally, came to the
+dilapidated gate he remembered so well, and looked up through the dusk at
+the house. If death had entered it, there was no sign: death must be a
+frequent visitor hereabouts. On the doorsteps he saw figures outlined,
+slatternly women and men in shirt-sleeves who rose in silence to make way
+for him, staring at him curiously. He plunged into the hot darkness of
+the hall, groped his way up the stairs and through the passage, and
+hesitated. A single gas jet burned low in the stagnant air, and after a
+moment he made out, by its dim light, a woman on her knees beside the
+couch, mechanically moving the tattered palm-leaf over the motionless
+little figure. The child was still alive. He drew a deep breath, and
+entered; at the sound of his step Mrs. Garvin suddenly started up.
+
+"Richard!" she cried, and then stood staring at the rector. "Have you
+seen my husband, sir? He went away soon after you left."
+
+Hodder, taken by surprise, replied that he had not. Her tone, her
+gesture of anxiety he found vaguely disquieting.
+
+"The doctor has been here?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," she answered absently. "I don't know where he can be--Richard.
+He didn't even wait to see the doctor. And he thinks so much of Dicky,
+sir, he sits here of an evening--"
+
+Hodder sat down beside her, and taking the palm-leaf from her hand, began
+himself to fan the child. Something of her misgiving had communicated
+itself to him.
+
+"Don't worry," he said. "Remember that you have been through a great
+deal, and it is natural that you should be overwrought. Your husband
+feels strongly. I don't blame him. And the sight of me this afternoon
+upset him. He has gone out to walk."
+
+"Richard is proud," she answered simply. "He used to say he'd rather
+die than take charity--and now he's come to it. And it's--that man, sir,
+who's got on his brain, and changed him. He wasn't always like this, but
+now he can't seem to think of anything else. He wakes up in the night
+. . . . And he used to have such a sweet nature--you wouldn't have
+known him . . . and came home so happy in the evenings in Alder
+Street, often with a little fruit, or something he'd bought for us, and
+romp with Dicky in the yard, and I'd stand and laugh at them. Even after
+we'd lost our money, when he was sick that time, he didn't feel this way.
+It grew on him when he couldn't get work, and then he began to cut things
+out of the papers about Mr. Parr. And I have sometimes thought that
+that's kept him from getting work. He talks about it, and people don't
+know what to make of him. They don't know how hard he'd try if they'd
+give him something.". . . .
+
+"We shall find something," said the rector, striving to throw into his
+voice confidence and calm. He did not dare to look at her, but continued
+to move the fan.
+
+The child stirred a little. Mrs. Garvin put out her hand.
+
+"Yes, the doctor was here. He was very kind. Oh, sir," she exclaimed,
+"I hope you won't think us ungrateful--and that Mr. Bentley won't.
+Dr. Jarvis has hopes, sir,--he says--I forget the name he called it, what
+Dicky has. It's something uncommon. He says it was--brought on by the
+heat, and want of food--good food. And he's coming himself in the
+morning to take him out to that hospital beyond the park--in an
+automobile, sir. I was just thinking what a pity it is Dicky wouldn't
+realize it. He's always wanted to ride in one." Suddenly her tears
+flowed, unheeded, and she clung to the little hand convulsively.
+"I don't know what I shall do without him, Sir, I don't . . . . I've
+always had him . . . and when he's sick, among strangers." . . .
+
+The rector rose to the occasion.
+
+"Now, Mrs. Garvin," he said firmly, "you must remember that there is only
+one way to save the boy's life. It will be easy to get you a room near
+the hospital, where you can see him constantly."
+
+"I know--I know, sir. But I couldn't leave his father, I couldn't leave
+Richard." She looked around distractedly. "Where is he?"
+
+"He will come back presently," said the rector. "If not, I will look for
+him."
+
+She did not reply, but continued to weep in silence. Suddenly, above the
+confused noises of the night, the loud notes of a piano broke, and the
+woman whose voice he had heard in the afternoon began once more with
+appalling vigour to sing. The child moaned.
+
+Mrs. Garvin started up hysterically.
+
+"I can't stand it--I can't stand her singing that now," she sobbed.
+
+Thirty feet away, across the yard, Hodder saw the gleaming window from
+which the music came. He got to his feet. Another verse began, with
+more of the brazen emphasis of the concert-hall singer than ever.
+He glanced at the woman beside him, irresolutely.
+
+"I'll speak to her," he said.
+
+Mrs. Garvin did not appear to hear him, but flung herself down beside the
+lounge. As he seized his hat and left the room he had the idea of
+telephoning for a nurse, when he almost ran into some one in the upper
+hall, and recognized the stout German woman, Mrs. Breitmann.
+
+"Mrs. Garvin"--he said, "she ought not to be left--"
+
+"I am just now going," said Mrs. Breitmann. "I stay with her until her
+husband come."
+
+Such was the confidence with which, for some reason, she inspired him,
+that he left with an easier mind.
+
+It was not until the rector had arrived at the vestibule of the apartment
+house next door that something--of the difficulty and delicacy of the
+errand he had undertaken came home to him. Impulse had brought him thus
+far, but now he stood staring helplessly at a row of bells, speaking
+tubes, and cards. Which, for example, belonged to the lady whose soprano
+voice pervaded the neighbourhood? He looked up and down the street, in
+the vain hope of finding a messenger. The song continued: he had
+promised to stop it. Hodder accused himself of cowardice.
+
+To his horror, Hodder felt stealing over him, incredible though it seemed
+after the depths through which he had passed, a faint sense of
+fascination in the adventure. It was this that appalled him--this
+tenacity of the flesh,--which no terrors seemed adequate to drive out.
+The sensation, faint as it was, unmanned him. There were still many
+unexplored corners in his soul.
+
+He turned, once more contemplated the bells, and it was not until
+then he noticed that the door was ajar. He pushed it open, climbed the
+staircase, and stood in the doorway of what might be called a sitting
+room, his eyes fixed on a swaying back before an upright piano against
+the wall; his heart seemed to throb with the boisterous beat of the
+music. The woman's hair, in two long and heavy plaits falling below her
+waist, suddenly fascinated him. It was of the rarest of russet reds.
+She came abruptly to the end of the song.
+
+"I beg your pardon--" he began.
+
+She swung about with a start, her music dropping to the floor, and stared
+at him. Her tattered blue kimono fell away at her elbows, her full
+throat was bare, and a slipper she had kicked off lay on the floor beside
+her. He recoiled a little, breathing deeply. She stared at him.
+
+"My God, how you scared me!" she exclaimed. Evidently a second glance
+brought to her a realization of his clerical costume. "Say, how did you
+get in here?"
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said again, "but there is a very sick child in
+the house next door and I came to ask you if you would mind not playing
+any more to-night."
+
+She did not reply at once, and her expression he found unsolvable. Much
+of it might be traced to a life which had contracted the habit of taking
+nothing on trust, a life which betrayed itself in unmistakable traces
+about the eyes. And Hodder perceived that the face, if the stamp of this
+expression could have been removed, was not unpleasing, although
+indulgence and recklessness were beginning to remould it.
+
+"Quit stringin' me," she said.
+
+For a moment he was at a loss. He gathered that she did not believe him,
+and crossed to the open window.
+
+"If you will come here," he said, "I will show you the room where he
+lies. We hope to be able to take him to the hospital to-morrow." He
+paused a moment, and added: "He enjoyed your music very much when he was
+better."
+
+The comment proved a touchstone.
+
+"Say," she remarked, with a smile that revealed a set of surprisingly
+good teeth, "I can make the box talk when I get a-goin'. There's no
+stopping me this side of grand opera,--that's no fable. I'm not so bad
+for an enginoo, am I?"
+
+Thus directly appealed to, in common courtesy he assented.
+
+"No indeed," he said.
+
+"That's right," she declared. "But the managers won't have it at any
+price. Those jays don't know anything, do they? They've only got a
+dream of what the public wants. You wouldn't believe it, but I've sung
+for 'em, and they threw me out. You wouldn't believe it, would you?"
+
+"I must own," said the rector, "that I have never had any experience with
+managers."
+
+She sat still considering him from the piano stool, her knees apart, her
+hands folded in her lap. Mockery came into her eyes.
+
+"Say, what did you come in here for, honest injun?" she demanded.
+
+He was aware of trying to speak sternly, and of failing. To save his
+life he could not, then, bring up before himself the scene in the little
+back room across the yard in its full terror and reality, reproduce his
+own feelings of only a few minutes ago which had impelled him hither.
+A month, a year might have elapsed. Every faculty was now centred on
+the woman in front of him, and on her life.
+
+"Why do you doubt me?" he asked.
+
+She continued to contemplate him. Her eyes were strange, baffling,
+smouldering, yellow-brown, shifting, yet not shifty: eyes with a history.
+Her laugh proclaimed both effrontery and uneasiness.
+
+"Don't get huffy," she said. "The kid's sick--that's on the level, is
+it? You didn't come 'round to see me?" The insinuation was in her voice
+as well as in her words. He did not resent it, but felt an odd thrill of
+commingled pity and--fear.
+
+"I came for the reason I have given you," he replied; and added, more
+gently: "I know it is a good deal to ask, but you will be doing a great
+kindness. The mother is distracted. The child, as I told you, will be
+taken to the hospital in the morning."
+
+She reached out a hand and closed the piano softly.
+
+"I guess I can hold off for to-night," she said. "Sometimes things get
+kind of dull--you know, when there's nothing doing, and this keeps me
+lively. How old is the kid?"
+
+"About nine," he estimated.
+
+"Say, I'm sorry." She spoke with a genuineness of feeling that surprised
+him. He went slowly, almost apologetically toward the door.
+
+"Good night," he said, "and thank you."
+
+Her look halted him.
+
+"What's your hurry?" she demanded.
+
+"I'm sorry," he said hastily, "but I must be going." He was, in truth,
+in a panic to leave.
+
+"You're a minister, ain't you?"
+
+"Yes," he said.
+
+"I guess you don't think much of me, do you?" she demanded.
+
+He halted abruptly, struck by the challenge, and he saw that this woman
+had spoken not for herself, but for an entire outlawed and desperate
+class. The fact that the words were mocking and brazen made no
+difference; it would have been odd had they not been so. With a shock
+of surprise he suddenly remembered that his inability to reach this
+class had been one of the causes of his despair! And now? With the
+realization, reaction set in, an overpowering feeling of weariness, a
+desire--for rest--for sleep. The electric light beside the piano danced
+before his eyes, yet he heard within him a voice crying out to him to
+stay. Desperately tired though he was, he must not leave now. He walked
+slowly to the table, put his hat on it and sat down in a chair beside it.
+
+"Why do you say that?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, cut it out!" said the woman. "I'm on to you church folks." She
+laughed. "One of 'em came in here once, and wanted to pray. I made a
+monkey of him."
+
+"I hope," said the rector, smiling a little, "that is not the reason why
+you wish me to stay."
+
+She regarded him doubtfully.
+
+"You're not the same sort," she announced at length.
+
+"What sort was he?"
+
+"He was easy,--old enough to know better--most of the easy ones are. He
+marched in sanctimonious as you please, with his mouth full of salvation
+and Bible verses." She laughed again at the recollection.
+
+"And after that," said the rector, "you felt that ministers were a lot of
+hypocrites."
+
+"I never had much opinion of 'em," she admitted, "nor of church people,
+either," she added, with emphasis.
+
+"There's Ferguson, who has the department store,--he's 'way up' in church
+circles. I saw him a couple of months ago, one Sunday morning, driving
+to that church on Burton Street, where all the rich folks go. I forget
+the name--"
+
+"St. John's," he supplied. He had got beyond surprise.
+
+"St. John's--that's it. They tell me he gives a lot of money to it
+--money that he steals from the girls he hires. Oh, yes, he'll get to
+heaven--I don't think."
+
+"How do you mean that he steals money from the girls?"
+
+"Say, you are innocent--ain't you! Did you ever go down to that store?
+Do you know what a floorwalker is? Did you ever see the cheap guys
+hanging around, and the young swells waiting to get a chance at the girls
+behind the counters? Why do you suppose so many of 'em take to the easy
+life? I'll put you next--because Ferguson don't pay 'em enough to live
+on. That's why. He makes 'em sign a paper, when he hires 'em, that they
+live at home, that they've got some place to eat and sleep, and they sign
+it all right. That's to square up Ferguson's conscience. But say, if
+you think a girl can support herself in this city and dress on what he
+pays, you've got another guess comin'."
+
+There rose up before him, unsummoned, the image of Nan Ferguson, in all
+her freshness and innocence, as she had stood beside him on the porch in
+Park Street. He was somewhat astonished to find himself defending his
+parishioner.
+
+"May it not be true, in order to compete with other department stores,
+that Mr. Ferguson has to pay the same wages?" he said.
+
+"Forget it. I guess you know what Galt House is? That's where women
+like me can go when we get all played out and there's nothing left in the
+game--it's on River Street. Maybe you've been there."
+
+Hodder nodded.
+
+"Well," she continued, "Ferguson pays a lot of money to keep that going,
+and gets his name in the papers. He hands over to the hospitals where
+some of us die--and it's all advertised. He forks out to the church.
+Now, I put it to you, why don't he sink some of that money where it
+belongs--in living wages? Because there's nothing in it for him
+--that's why."
+
+The rector looked at her in silence. He had not suspected her of so much
+intellect. He glanced about the apartment, at the cheap portiere flung
+over the sofa; at the gaudy sofa cushions, two of which bore the names
+and colours of certain colleges. The gas log was almost hidden by dried
+palm leaves, a cigarette stump lay on the fender; on the mantel above
+were several photographs of men and at the other side an open door
+revealed a bedroom.
+
+"This is a nice place, ain't it?" she observed. "I furnished it when I
+was on velvet--nothing was too good for me. Money's like champagne when
+you take the cork out, it won't keep. I was rich once. It was lively
+while it lasted," she added, with a sigh: "I've struck the down trail.
+I oughtn't, by rights, to be here fooling with you. There's nothing in
+it." She glanced at the clock. "I ought to get busy."
+
+As the realization of her meaning came to him, he quivered.
+
+"Is there no way but that?" he asked, in a low voice.
+
+"Say, you're not a-goin' to preach, are you?"
+
+"No," he answered, "God forbid! I was not asking the question of you."
+
+She stared at him.
+
+"Of who, then?"
+
+He was silent.
+
+"You've left me at the station. But on the level, you don't seem to know
+much, that's a fact. You don't think the man who owns these flats is in
+it for charity, do you? 'Single ladies,' like me, have to give up. And
+then there are other little grafts that wouldn't interest you. What
+church do you come from anyway?"
+
+"You mentioned it a little while ago."
+
+"St. John's!" She leaned back against the piano and laughed
+unrestrainedly. "That's a good one, to think how straight I've been
+talking to you."
+
+"I'm much obliged to you," he said.
+
+Again she gazed at him, now plainly perplexed.
+
+"What are you giving me?"
+
+"I mean what I say," he answered. "I am obliged to you for telling me
+things I didn't know. And I appreciate--your asking me to stay."
+
+She was sitting upright now, her expression changed, her breath came more
+rapidly, her lips parted as she gazed at him.
+
+"Do you know," she said, "I haven't had anybody speak to me like that
+for four years." Her voice betrayed excitement, and differed in tone,
+and she had cast off unconsciously the vulgarity of speech. At that
+moment she seemed reminiscent of what she must once have been; and he
+found himself going through an effort at reconstruction.
+
+"Like what?" he asked.
+
+"Like a woman," she answered vehemently.
+
+"My name is John Hodder," he said, "and I live in the parish house, next
+door to the church. I should like to be your friend, if you will let me.
+If I can be of any help to you now, or at any other time, I shall feel
+happy. I promise not to preach," he added.
+
+She got up abruptly, and went to the window. And when she turned to him
+again, it was with something of the old bravado.
+
+"You'd better leave me alone, I'm no good;" she said. "I'm much obliged
+to you, but I don't want any charity or probation houses in mine. And
+honest work's a thing of the past for me--even if I could get a job.
+Nobody would have me. But if they would, I couldn't work any more.
+I've got out of the hang of it." With a swift and decisive movement she
+crossed the room, opened a cabinet on the wall, revealing a bottle and
+glasses.
+
+"So you're bent upon going--downhill?" he said.
+
+"What can you do to stop it?" she retorted defiantly, "Give me religion
+---I guess you'd tell me. Religion's all right for those on top, but
+say, it would be a joke if I got it. There ain't any danger. But if I
+did, it wouldn't pay room-rent and board."
+
+He sat mute. Once more the truth overwhelmed, the folly of his former
+optimism arose to mock him. What he beheld now, in its true aspect, was
+a disease of that civilization he had championed. . .
+
+She took the bottle from the cupboard and laid it on the table.
+
+"What's the difference?" she demanded. "It's all over in a little while,
+anyway. I guess you'd tell me there was a hell. But if that's so, some
+of your church folks'll broil, too. I'll take my chance on it, if they
+will." She looked at him, half in defiance, half in friendliness, across
+the table. "Say, you mean all right, but you're only wastin' time here.
+You can't do me any good, I tell you, and I've got to get busy."
+
+"May we not at least remain friends?" he asked, after a moment.
+
+Her laugh was a little harsh.
+
+"What kind of friendship would that be? You, a minister, and me a woman
+on the town?"
+
+"If I can stand it, I should think you might."
+
+"Well, I can't stand it," she answered.
+
+He got up, and held out his hand. She stood seemingly irresolute, and
+then took it.
+
+"Good night," he said.
+
+"Good night," she repeated nonchalantly.
+
+As he went out of the door she called after him:
+
+"Don't be afraid I'll worry the kid!"
+
+The stale odour of cigarette smoke with which the dim corridor was
+charged intoxicated, threatened to overpower him. It seemed to be the
+reek of evil itself. A closing door had a sinister meaning. He hurried;
+obscurity reigned below, the light in the lower hall being out; fumbled
+for the door-knob, and once in the street took a deep breath and mopped
+his brow; but he had not proceeded half a block before he hesitated,
+retraced his steps, reentered the vestibule, and stooped to peer at the
+cards under the speaking tubes. Cheaply printed in large script, was the
+name of the tenant of the second floor rear,--MISS KATE MARCY. . . .
+
+In crossing Tower Street he was frightened by the sharp clanging of a
+great electric car that roared past him, aflame with light. His brain
+had seemingly ceased to work, and he stumbled at the curb, for he was
+very tired. The events of the day no longer differentiated themselves
+in his mind but lay, a composite weight, upon his heart. At length he
+reached the silent parish house, climbed the stairs and searched in his
+pocket for the key of his rooms. The lock yielded, but while feeling for
+the switch he tripped and almost fell over an obstruction on the floor.
+
+The flooding light revealed his travelling-bags, as he had piled them,
+packed and ready to go to the station.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Inside of the Cup, Volume 3
+by Winston Churchill
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Ebook The Inside of the Cup, v3, by Winston Churchill
+WC#21 in our series by Winston Churchill (USA author, not Sir Winston)
+
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+Title: The Inside of the Cup, Volume 3.
+
+Author: Winston Churchill (USA author, not Sir Winston Churchill)
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INSIDE OF THE CUP, V3, BY CHURCHILL ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
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+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
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+
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+
+
+THE INSIDE OF THE CUP
+
+By Winston Churchill
+
+
+
+Volume 3.
+
+IX.       THE DIVINE DISCONTENT
+X.        THE MESSENGER IN THE CHURCH
+XI.       THE LOST PARISHIONER
+XII.      THE WOMAN OF THE SONG
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE DIVINE DISCONTENT
+
+I
+
+It was the last Sunday in May, and in another week the annual flight to
+the seashore and the mountains would have begun again.  The breezes
+stealing into the church through the open casements wafted hither and
+thither the odours of the chancel flowers, and mingled with those fainter
+and subtler perfumes set free by the rustling of summer gowns.
+
+As on this day he surveyed his decorous and fashionable congregation,
+Hodder had something of that sense of extremity which the great apostle
+to the Gentiles himself must have felt when he stood in the midst of the
+Areopagus and made his vain yet sublime appeal to Athenian indifference
+and luxury.  "And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now
+commandeth all men everywhere to repent."  .  .  Some, indeed, stirred
+uneasily as the rector paused, lowering their eyes before the intensity
+of his glance, vaguely realizing that the man had flung the whole passion
+of his being into the appeal.
+
+Heedlessness--that was God's accusation against them, against the age.
+Materialism, individualism!  So absorbed were they in the pursuit of
+wealth, of distraction, so satisfied with the current philosophy, so
+intent on surrounding themselves with beautiful things and thus shutting
+out the sterner view, that they had grown heedless of the divine message.
+How few of them availed themselves of their spiritual birthright to renew
+their lives at the altar rail!  And they had permitted their own children
+to wander away .  .  .  .  Repent!
+
+There was a note of desperation in his appeal, like that of the hermit
+who stands on a mountain crag and warns the gay and thoughtless of the
+valley of the coming avalanche.  Had they heard him at last?  There were
+a few moments of tense silence, during which he stood gazing at them.
+Then he raised his arm in benediction, gathered up his surplice,
+descended the pulpit steps, and crossed swiftly the chancel .  .  .  .
+
+He had, as it were, turned on all the power in a supreme effort to reach
+them.  What if he had failed again?  Such was the misgiving that beset
+him, after the service, as he got out of his surplice, communicated by
+some occult telepathy .  .  .  .  Mr. Parr was awaiting him, and
+summoning his courage, hope battling against intuition, he opened the
+door into the now empty church and made his way toward the porch, where
+the sound of voices warned him that several persons were lingering.  The
+nature of their congratulations confirmed his doubts.  Mrs. Plimpton,
+resplendent and looking less robust than usual in one of her summer Paris
+gowns, greeted him effusively.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Hodder, what a wonderful sermon!" she cried.  "I can't express
+how it made me feel--so delinquent!  Of course that is exactly the effect
+you wished.  And I was just telling Wallis I was so glad I waited until
+Tuesday to go East, or I should have missed it.  You surely must come on
+to Hampton and visit us, and preach it over again in our little stone
+church there, by the sea.  Good-by and don't forget!  I'll write you,
+setting the date, only we'd be glad to have you any time."
+
+"One of the finest I ever heard--if not the finest," Mr. Plimpton
+declared, with a kind of serious 'empressement', squeezing his hand.
+
+Others stopped him; Everett Constable, for one, and the austere Mrs.
+Atterbury.  Hodder would have avoided the ever familiar figure of her
+son, Gordon, in the invariable black cutaway and checked trousers,
+but he was standing beside Mr. Parr.
+
+"Ahem!  Why, Mr. Hodder," he exclaimed, squinting off his glasses,
+"that was a magnificent effort.  I was saying to Mr. Parr that it isn't
+often one hears a sermon nowadays as able as that, and as sound.  Many
+clergymen refrain from preaching them, I sometimes think, because they
+are afraid people won't like them."
+
+"I scarcely think it's that," the rector replied, a little shortly.
+"We're afraid people won't heed them."
+
+He became aware, as he spoke, of a tall young woman, who had cast an
+enigmatic glance first at Gordon Atterbury, and then at himself.
+
+"It was a good sermon," said Mr. Parr.  "You're coming to lunch, Hodder?"
+
+The rector nodded.  "I'm ready when you are," he answered.
+
+"The motor's waiting," said the banker, leading the way down the steps to
+the sidewalk, where he turned.  "Alison, let me introduce Mr. Hodder.
+This is my daughter," he added simply.
+
+This sudden disclosure of the young woman's identity had upon Hodder a
+certain electric effect, and with it came a realization of the extent to
+which--from behind the scenes, so to speak--she had gradually aroused him
+to a lively speculation.  She seemed to have influenced, to a greater or
+less degree, so many lives with which he had come into touch!  Compelled
+persons to make up their minds about her!  And while he sympathized
+with Eldon Parr in his abandonment, he had never achieved the full
+condemnation which he felt--an impartial Christian morality would have
+meted out.
+
+As he uttered the conventional phrase and took her hand, he asked himself
+whether her personality justified his interest.  Her glance at Gordon
+Atterbury in the midst of that gentleman's felicitations on the sermon
+had been expressive, Hodder thought, of veiled amusement slightly
+tinctured with contempt; and he, Hodder, felt himself to have grown warm
+over it.  He could not be sure that Alison Parr had not included, in her
+inner comment, the sermon likewise, on which he had so spent himself.
+What was she doing at church?  As her eyes met his own, he seemed to
+read a challenge.  He had never encountered a woman--he decided--who
+so successfully concealed her thought, and at the same time so incited
+curiosity about it.
+
+The effect of her reappearance on Gordon Atterbury was painfully
+apparent, and Mrs. Larrabbee's remark, "that he had never got over it,"
+recurred to Hodder.  He possessed the virtue of being faithful, at least,
+in spite of the lady's apostasy, and he seemed to be galvanized into a
+tenfold nervousness as he hustled after them and handed her, with the
+elaborate attention little men are apt to bestow upon women, into the
+motor.
+
+"Er--how long shall you be here, Alison?" he asked.  "I don't know," she
+answered, not unkindly, but with a touch of indifference.
+
+"You treat us shamefully," he informed her, "upon my word!  But I'm
+coming to call."
+
+"Do," said Alison.  Hodder caught her eye again, and this time he was
+sure that she surprised in him a certain disdain of Mr. Atterbury's zeal.
+Her smile was faint, yet unmistakable.
+
+He resented it.  Indeed, it was with a well-defined feeling of antagonism
+that he took his seat, and this was enhanced as they flew westward, Mr.
+Parr wholly absorbed with the speaking trumpet, energetically rebuking at
+every bounce.  In the back of the rector's mind lay a weight, which he
+identified, at intervals, with what he was now convinced was the failure
+of his sermon.  .  .  Alison took no part in the casual conversation that
+began when they reached the boulevard and Mr. Parr abandoned the trumpet,
+but lay back in silence and apparently with entire comfort in a corner of
+the limousine.
+
+At the lunch-table Mr. Parr plunged into a discussion of some of the
+still undecided details of the new settlement house, in which, as the
+plan developed, he had become more and more interested.  He had made
+himself responsible, from time to time, for additional sums, until the
+original estimate had been almost doubled.  Most of his suggestions had
+come from Hodder, who had mastered the subject with a thoroughness that
+appealed to the financier: and he had gradually accepted the rector's
+idea of concentrating on the children.  Thus he had purchased an
+adjoining piece of land that was to be a model playground, in connection
+with the gymnasium and swimming-pool.  The hygienic department was to be
+all that modern science could desire.
+
+"If we are going to do the thing," the banker would, remark, "we may as
+well do it thoroughly; we may as well be leaders and not followers."
+
+So, little by little, the scheme had grown to proportions that sometimes
+appalled the rector when he realized how largely he had been responsible
+for the additions,--in spite of the lukewarmness with which he had begun.
+And yet it had occasionally been Mr. Parr who, with a sweep of his hand,
+had added thousands to a particular feature: thus the dance-hall had
+become, in prospect, a huge sun-parlour at the top of the building, where
+the children were to have their kindergartens and games in winter; and
+which might be shaded and opened up to the breezes in summer.  What had
+reconciled Hodder to the enterprise most of all, however, was the chapel
+--in the plan a beautiful Gothic church--whereby he hoped to make the
+religious progress keep pace with the social.  Mr. Parr was decidedly in
+sympathy with this intention, and referred to it now.
+
+"I was much impressed by what you said in your sermon to-day as to the
+need of insisting upon authority in religious matters," he declared, "and
+I quite agree that we should have a chapel of some size at the settlement
+house for that reason.  Those people need spiritual control.  It's what
+the age needs.  And when I think of some of the sermons printed in the
+newspapers to-day, and which are served up as Christianity, there is only
+one term to apply to them--they are criminally incendiary."
+
+"But isn't true Christianity incendiary, in your meaning of the word?"
+
+It was Alison who spoke, in a quiet and musical voice that was in
+striking contrast to the tone of Mr. Parr, which the rector had thought
+unusually emphatic.  It was the first time she had shown an inclination
+to contribute to the talk.  But since Hodder had sat down at the table
+her presence had disturbed him, and he had never been wholly free from an
+uncomfortable sense that he was being measured and weighed.
+
+Once or twice he had stolen a glance at her as she sat, perfectly at
+ease, and asked himself whether she had beauty, and it dawned upon him
+little by little that the very proportion she possessed made for physical
+unobtrusiveness.  She was really very tall for a woman.  At first he
+would have said her nose was straight, when he perceived that it had a
+delicate hidden curve; her eyes were curiously set, her dark hair parted
+in the middle, brought down low on each side of the forehead and tied in
+a Grecian knot.  Thus, in truth, he observed, were seemingly all the
+elements of the classic, even to the firm yet slender column of the neck.
+How had it eluded him?
+
+Her remark, if it astonished Hodder, had a dynamic effect on Eldon Parr.
+And suddenly the rector comprehended that the banker had not so much been
+talking to him as through him; had been, as it were, courting opposition.
+
+"What do you mean by Christianity being incendiary?" he demanded.
+
+"Incendiary, from your point of view--I made, the qualification,"
+Alison replied, apparently unmoved by his obvious irritation.  "I don't
+pretend to be a Christian, as you know, but if there is one element
+in Christianity that distinguishes it, it is the brotherhood of man.
+That's pure nitroglycerin, though it's been mixed with so much sawdust.
+Incendiary is a mild epithet.  I never read the sermons you refer to;
+I dare say they're crude, but they're probably attempts to release an
+explosive which would blow your comfortable social system and its
+authority into atoms."
+
+Hodder, who had listened in amazement, glanced at the banker.  He had
+never before heard him opposed, or seen him really angry.
+
+"I've heard that doctrine," cried Mr. Parr.  "Those who are dissatisfied
+with things as they are because they have been too stupid or too weak
+or self-indulgent to rise, find it easy to twist the principles of
+Christianity into revolutionary propaganda.  It's a case of the devil
+quoting Scripture.  The brotherhood of man!  There has never been an age
+when philanthropy and organized charity were on such a scale as to-day."
+
+A certain gallant, indomitable ring crept into Alison's voice; she did
+not seem in the least dismayed or overborne.
+
+"But isn't that just where most so-called Christians make their mistake?"
+she asked.  "Philanthropy and organized charity, as they exist to-day,
+have very little to do with the brotherhood of man.  Mightn't it be you
+who are fooling yourselves instead of the incendiaries fooling themselves
+So long as you can make yourselves believe that this kind of charity is
+a logical carrying out of the Christian principles, so long are your
+consciences satisfied with the social system which your class, very
+naturally, finds so comfortable and edifying.  The weak and idiotic ought
+to be absurdly grateful for what is flung to them, and heaven is gained
+in the throwing.  In this way the rich inevitably become the elect, both
+here and hereafter, and the needle's eye is widened into a gap."
+
+There was on Mr. Parr's lips a smile not wholly pleasant to see.  Indeed,
+in the last few minutes there had been revealed to Hodder a side of the
+banker's character which had escaped him in the two years of their
+acquaintance.
+
+"I suppose," said Mr. Parr, slowly, drumming on the table, "you would say
+that of the new settlement house of St. John's, whereby we hope to raise
+a whole neighbourhood."
+
+"Yes, I should," replied Alison, with spirit.  "The social system by
+which you thrive, and which politically and financially you strive to
+maintain, is diametrically opposed to your creed, which is supposed to be
+the brotherhood of man.  But if that were really your creed, you would
+work for it politically and financially.  You would see that your Church
+is trying to do infinitesimally what the government, but for your
+opposition, might do universally.  Your true creed is the survival of the
+fittest.  You grind these people down into what is really an economic
+slavery and dependence, and then you insult and degrade them by inviting
+them to exercise and read books and sing hymns in your settlement house,
+and give their children crackers and milk and kindergartens and sunlight!
+I don't blame them for not becoming Christians on that basis.  Why, the
+very day I left New York a man over eighty, who had been swindled out
+of all he had, rather than go to one of those Christian institutions
+deliberately forged a check and demanded to be sent to the penitentiary.
+He said he could live and die there with some self-respect."
+
+"I might have anticipated that you would ultimately become a Socialist,
+Alison," Mr. Parr remarked--but his voice trembled.
+
+"I don't know whether I'm a Socialist or an Anarchist," she answered.
+Hodder thought be detected a note of hopelessness in her voice, and the
+spirit in it ebbed a little.  Not only did she seem indifferent to her
+father's feeling--which incidentally added fuel to it--but her splendid
+disregard of him, as a clergyman, had made an oddly powerful appeal.
+And her argument!  His feelings, as he listened to this tremendous
+arraignment of Eldon Parr by his daughter, are not easily to be
+described.  To say that she had compelled him, the rector of St. John's,
+at last to look in the face many conditions which be had refused to
+recognize would be too definite a statement.  Nevertheless, some such
+thing had occurred.  Refutations sprang to his lips, and died there,
+though he had no notion of uttering them.  He saw that to admit her
+contentions would be to behold crumble into ruins the structure that
+he had spent a life in rearing; and yet something within him responded
+to her words--they had the passionate, convincing ring of truth.
+
+By no means the least of their disturbing effects was due to the fact
+that they came as a climax to, as a fulfilment of the revelation he had
+had at the Fergusons', when something of the true nature of Mr. Plimpton
+and others of his congregation had suddenly been laid bare.  And now
+Hodder looked at Eldon Parr to behold another man from the one he had
+known, and in that moment realized that their relationship could never
+again be the same.  .  .  Were his sympathies with the daughter?
+
+"I don't know what I believe," said Alison, after a pause.  "I've ceased
+trying to find out.  What's the use!"  She appeared now to be addressing
+no one in particular.
+
+A servant entered with a card, and the banker's hand shook perceptibly
+as he put down his claret and adjusted his glasses.
+
+"Show him into my office upstairs, and tell him I'll see him at once," he
+said, and glanced at the rector.  But it was Alison whom he addressed.
+"I must leave Mr. Hodder to answer your arguments," he added, with an
+attempt at lightness; and then to the rector: "Perhaps you can convince
+her that the Church is more sinned against than sinning, and that
+Christians are not such terrible monsters after all.  You'll excuse me?"
+
+"Certainly."  Hodder had risen.
+
+
+
+II
+
+"Shall we have coffee in the garden?"  Alison asked.  "It's much nicer
+outside this time of year."
+
+For an instant he was at a loss to decide whether to accede, or to make
+an excuse and leave the house.  Wisdom seemed to point to flight.  But
+when he glanced at her he saw to his surprise that the mood of
+abstraction into which she had fallen still held her; that the discussion
+which had aroused Eldon Parr to such dramatic anger had left her serious
+and thoughtful.  She betrayed no sense of triumph at having audaciously
+and successfully combated him, and she appeared now only partially to be
+aware of Hodder's presence.  His interest, his curiosity mounted suddenly
+again, overwhelming once more the antagonism which he had felt come and
+go in waves; and once more his attempted classification of her was swept
+away.  She had relapsed into an enigma.
+
+"I like the open air," he answered, "and I have always wished to see the
+garden.  I have admired it from the windows."
+
+"It's been on my mind for some years," she replied, as she led the way
+down a flight of steps into the vine-covered pergola.  "And I intend to
+change parts of it while I am out here.  It was one of my first attempts,
+and I've learned more since."
+
+"You must forgive my ignorant praise," he said, and smiled.  "I have
+always thought it beautiful: But I can understand that an artist is never
+satisfied."
+
+She turned to him, and suddenly their eyes met and held in a momentary,
+electric intensity that left him warm and agitated.  There was nothing
+coquettish in the glance, but it was the first distinct manifestation
+that he was of consequence.  She returned his smile, without levity.
+
+"Is a clergyman ever satisfied?"  she asked.
+
+"He ought not to be," replied Hodder, wondering whether she had read him.
+
+"Although you were so considerate, I suppose you must have thought it
+presumptuous of me to criticize your, profession, which is religion."
+
+"Religion, I think, should be everybody's," he answered quietly.
+
+She made no reply.  And he entered, as into another world, the circular
+arbour in which the pergola ended, so complete in contrast was its
+atmosphere to that of the house.  The mansion he had long since grown to
+recognize as an expression of the personality of its owner, but this
+classic bower was as remote from it as though it were in Greece.  He was
+sensitive to beauty, yet the beauty of the place had a perplexing
+quality, which he felt in the perfect curves of the marble bench, in the
+marble basin brimming to the tip with clear water,--the surface of which,
+flecked with pink petals, mirrored the azure sky through the leafy
+network of the roof.  In one green recess a slender Mercury hastily
+adjusted his sandal.
+
+Was this, her art, the true expression of her baffling personality?  As
+she had leaned back in the corner of the automobile she had given him the
+impression of a languor almost Oriental, but this had been startlingly
+dispelled at the lunch-table by the revelation of an animation and a
+vitality which had magically transformed her.  But now, as under the
+spell of a new encompassment of her own weaving, she seemed to revert to
+her former self, sinking, relaxed, into a wicker lounge beside the basin,
+one long and shapely hand in the water, the other idle in her lap.  Her
+eyes, he remarked, were the contradiction in her face.  Had they been
+larger, and almond-shaped, the illusion might have been complete.  They
+were neither opaque nor smouldering,--but Western eyes, amber-coloured,
+with delicately stencilled rays and long lashes.  And as they gazed up at
+him now they seemed to reflect, without disclosing the flitting thoughts
+behind them.  He felt antagonism and attraction in almost equal degree--
+the situation transcended his experience.
+
+"You don't intend to change this?" he asked, with an expressive sweep of
+his hand.
+
+"No," she said, "I've always liked it.  Tell me what you feel about it."
+
+He hesitated.
+
+"You resent it," she declared.
+
+"Why do you say that?" he demanded quickly.
+
+"I feel it," she answered calmly, but with a smile.
+
+"'Resent' would scarcely be the proper word," he contended, returning her
+smile, yet hesitating again.
+
+"You think it pagan," she told him.
+
+"Perhaps I do," he answered simply, as though impressed by her felicitous
+discovery of the adjective.
+
+Alison laughed.
+
+"It's pagan because I'm pagan, I suppose."
+
+"It's very beautiful--you have managed to get an extraordinary
+atmosphere," he continued, bent on doing himself an exact justice.  But
+I should say, if you pressed me, that it represents to me the deification
+of beauty to the exclusion of all else.  You have made beauty the Alpha
+and Omega."
+
+"There is nothing else for me," she said.
+
+The coffee-tray arrived and was deposited on a wicker table beside her.
+She raised herself on an elbow, filled his cup and handed it to him.
+
+"And yet," he persisted, "from the manner in which you spoke at the
+table--"
+
+"Oh, don't imagine I haven't thought?  But thinking isn't--believing."
+
+"No," he admitted, with a touch of sadness, "you are right.  There were
+certain comments you made on the Christian religion--"
+
+She interrupted him again.
+
+"As to the political side of it, which is Socialism, so far as I can
+see.  If there is any other side, I have never been able to discover it.
+It seems to me that if Christians were logical, they should be
+Socialists.  The brotherhood of man, cooperation--all that is Socialism,
+isn't it?  It's opposed to the principle of the survival of the fittest,
+which so many of these so-called Christians practise.  I used to think,
+when I came back from Paris, that I was a Socialist, and I went to a lot
+of their meetings in New York, and to lectures.  But after a while I saw
+there was something in Socialism that didn't appeal to me, something
+smothering,--a forced cooperation that did not leave one free.  I wanted
+to be free, I've been striving all my life to be free," she exclaimed
+passionately, and was silent an instant, inspecting him.  "Perhaps I owe
+you an apology for speaking as I did before a clergyman--especially
+before an honest one."
+
+He passed over the qualification with a characteristic smile.
+
+"Oh, if we are going to shut our ears to criticism we'd better give up
+being clergymen," he answered.  "I'm afraid there is a great deal of
+truth in what you said."
+
+"That's generous of you!" she exclaimed, and thrilled him with the
+tribute.  Nor was the tribute wholly in the words: there had come
+spontaneously into her voice an exquisite, modulated note that haunted
+him long after it had died away .  .  .  .
+
+"I had to say what I thought," she continued earnestly; "I stood it as
+long as I could.  Perhaps you didn't realize it, but my father was
+striking at me when he referred to your sermon, and spiritual control--
+and in other things he said when you were talking about the settlement-
+house.  He reserves for himself the right to do as he pleases, but
+insists that those who surround him shall adopt the subserviency which he
+thinks proper for the rest of the world.  If he were a Christian himself,
+I shouldn't mind it so much."
+
+Hodder was silent.  The thought struck him with the force of a great
+wind.
+
+"He's a Pharisee," Alison went on, following the train of her thought.
+"I remember the first time I discovered that--it was when I was reading
+the New Testament carefully, in the hope of finding something in
+Christianity I might take hold of.  And I was impressed particularly by
+the scorn with which Christ treated the Pharisees.  My father, too, if he
+had lived in those days, would have thought Christ a seditious person, an
+impractical, fanatical idealist, and would have tried to trip him up with
+literal questions concerning the law.  His real and primary interest--is
+in a social system that benefits himself and his kind, and because this
+is so, he, and men like him, would have it appear that Christianity is
+on the side of what they term law and order.  I do not say that they are
+hypocritical, that they reason this out.  They are elemental; and they
+feel intuitively that Christianity contains a vital spark which, if
+allowed to fly, would start a conflagration beyond their control.  The
+theologians have helped them to cover the spark with ashes, and naturally
+they won't allow the ashes to be touched, if they can help it."
+
+She lay very still.
+
+The rector had listened to her, at first with amazement, then with more
+complicated sensations as she thus dispassionately discussed the foremost
+member of his congregation and the first layman of the diocese, who was
+incidentally her own father.  In her masterly analysis of Eldon Parr, she
+had brought Hodder face to face with the naked truth, and compelled him
+to recognize it.  How could he attempt to refute it, with honesty?
+
+He remembered Mr. Parr's criticism of Alison.  There had been hardness in
+that, though it were the cry of a lacerated paternal affection.  In that,
+too, a lack of comprehension, an impotent anger at a visitation not
+understood, a punishment apparently unmerited.  Hodder had pitied him
+then--he still pitied him.  In the daughter's voice was no trace of
+resentment.  No one, seemingly, could be farther removed from him (the
+rector of St. John's) in her opinions and views of life, than Allison
+Parr; and yet he felt in her an undercurrent, deep and strong, which
+moved him strangely, strongly, irresistibly; he recognized a passionate
+desire for the truth, and the courage to face it at any cost, and a
+capacity for tenderness, revealed in flashes.
+
+"I have hurt you," she exclaimed.  "I am sorry."
+
+He collected himself.
+
+"It is not you who have hurt me," he replied.  "Reflections on the
+contradictions and imperfections of life are always painful.  And since
+I have been here, I have seen a great deal of your father."
+
+"You are fond of him!"
+
+He hesitated.  It was not an ordinary conversation they were dealing with
+realities, and he had a sense that vital issues were at stake.  He had,
+in that moment, to make a revaluation of his sentiments for the
+financier--to weigh the effect of her indictment.
+
+"Yes," he answered slowly, "I am fond of him.  He has shown me a side of
+himself, perhaps, that other men have not seen,--and he is very lonely."
+
+"You pity him."  He started at her word.  "I guessed that from an
+expression that crossed your face when we were at the table.  But surely
+you must have observed the incongruity of his relationship with your
+Church!  Surely, in preaching as you did this morning against
+materialism, individualism, absorption in the pursuit of wealth, you must
+have had my father in mind as the supreme example!  And yet he listened
+to you as serenely as though he had never practised any of these things!
+
+"Clergymen wonder why Christianity doesn't make more progress to-day;
+well, what strikes the impartial observer who thinks about the subject at
+all, as one reason, is the paralyzing inconsistency of an alliance
+between those who preach the brotherhood of man and those who are opposed
+to it.  I've often wondered what clergymen would say about it, if they
+were frank--only I never see any clergymen."
+
+He was strongly agitated.  He did not stop--strangely enough--to reflect
+how far they had gone, to demand by what right she brought him to the
+bar, challenged the consistency of his life.  For she had struck, with a
+ruthless precision, at the very core of his trouble, revealed it for what
+it was.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I can see how we may be accused of inconsistency, and
+with much justice."
+
+His refusal to excuse and vindicate himself impressed her as no attempt
+at extenuation could have done.  Perhaps, in that moment, her quick
+instinct divined something of his case, something of the mental suffering
+he strove to conceal.  Contrition shone in her eyes.
+
+"I ought not to have said that," she exclaimed gently.  "It is so easy
+for outsiders to criticize those who are sincere--and I am sure you are.
+We cannot know all the perplexities.  But when we look at the Church, we
+are puzzled by that--which I have mentioned--and by other things."
+
+"What other things?" he demanded.
+
+She hesitated in her turn.
+
+"I suppose you think it odd, my having gone to church, feeling as I do,"
+she said.  "But St. John's is now the only place vividly associated with
+my mother.  She was never at home here, in this house.  I always go at
+least once when I am out here.  And I listened to your sermon intently."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I wanted to tell you this: you interested me as I had not been
+interested since I was twenty, when I made a desperate attempt to become
+a Christian--and failed.  Do you know how you struck me?  It was as a man
+who actually had a great truth which he was desperately trying to impart,
+and could not.  I have not been in a church more than a dozen times in
+the last eight years, but you impressed me as a man who felt something
+--whatever it is."
+
+He did not speak.
+
+"But why," she cried, "do you insist on what you cell authority?  As a
+modern woman who has learned to use her own mind, I simply can't believe,
+if the God of the universe is the moral God you assert him to be, that he
+has established on earth an agency of the kind you infer, and delegated
+to it the power of life and death over human souls.  Perhaps you do not
+go so far, but if you make the claim at all you must make it in its
+entirety.  There is an idea of commercialism, of monopoly in that
+conception which is utterly repugnant to any one who tries to approach
+the subject with a fresh mind, and from an ideal point of view.  And
+religion must be idealism--mustn't it?
+
+"Your ancient monks and saints weren't satisfied until they had
+settled every detail of the invisible world, of the past and future.
+They mapped it out as if it were a region they had actually explored,
+like geographers.  They used their reason, and what science they had, to
+make theories about it which the churches still proclaim as the catholic
+and final truth.  You forbid us to use our reason.  You declare, in order
+to become Christians, that we have to accept authoritative statements.
+Oh, can't you see that an authoritative statement is just what an
+ethical person doesn't want?  Belief--faith doesn't consist in the mere
+acceptance of a statement, but in something much higher--if we can
+achieve it.  Acceptance of authority is not faith, it is mere credulity,
+it is to shirk the real issue.  We must believe, if we believe at all,
+without authority.  If we knew, there would be no virtue in striving.
+If I choose a God," she added, after a pause, "I cannot take a consensus
+of opinion about him,--he must be my God."
+
+Hodder did not speak immediately.  Strange as it may seem, he had
+never heard the argument, and the strength of it, reenforced by the
+extraordinary vitality and earnestness of the woman who had uttered it,
+had a momentary stunning effect.  He sat contemplating her as she lay
+back among the cushions, and suddenly he seemed to see in her the
+rebellious child of which her father had spoken.  No wonder Eldon Parr
+had misunderstood her, had sought to crush her spirit!  She was to be
+dealt with in no common way, nor was the consuming yearning he discerned
+in her to be lightly satisfied.
+
+"The God of the individualist," he said at length--musingly, not
+accusingly.
+
+"I am an individualist," she admitted simply.  "But I am at least logical
+in that philosophy, and the individualists who attend the churches to-day
+are not.  The inconsistency of their lives is what makes those of us who
+do not go to church doubt the efficacy of their creed, which seems to
+have no power to change them.  The majority of people in St. John's are
+no more Christians than I am.  They attend service once a week, and the
+rest of the time they are bent upon getting all they can of pleasure
+and profit for themselves.  Do you wonder that those who consider this
+spectacle come inevitably to the conclusion that either Christianity
+is at fault, is outworn, or else that it is presented in the wrong way?"
+
+The rector rose abruptly, walked to the entrance of the arbour, and stood
+staring out across the garden.  Presently he turned and came back and
+stood over her.
+
+"Since you ask me," he said slowly, "I do not wonder at it."
+
+She raised her eyes swiftly.
+
+"When you speak like that," she exclaimed with an enthusiasm that
+stirred him, despite the trouble of his mind, "I cannot think of you as
+a clergyman,--but as a man.  Indeed," she added, in the surprise of her
+discovery, "I have never thought of you as a clergyman--even when I first
+saw you this morning.  I could not account then for a sense of duality
+about you that puzzled me.  Do you always preach as earnestly as that?"
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I felt as if you were throwing your whole soul into the effort-=oh,
+I felt it distinctly.  You made some of them, temporarily, a little
+uncomfortable, but they do not understand you, and you didn't change
+them.  It seemed to me you realized this when Gordon Atterbury spoke to
+you.  I tried to analyze the effect on myself--if it had been in the
+slightest degree possible for my reason to accept what you said you
+might, through sheer personality, have compelled me to reconsider.
+As it was, I found myself resisting you."
+
+With his hands clasped behind him, he paced across the arbour and back
+again.
+
+"Have you ever definitely and sincerely tried to put what the Church
+teaches into practice?" he asked.
+
+"Orthodox Christianity? penance, asceticism, self-abnegation--repression
+--falling on my knees and seeking a forgiveness out of all proportion to
+the trespass, and filled with a sense of total depravity?  If I did that
+I should lose myself--the only valuable thing I've got."
+
+Hodder, who had resumed his pacing, glanced at her involuntarily, and
+fought an inclination to agree with her.
+
+"I see no one upon whom I can rely but myself," she went on with the
+extraordinary energy she was able to summon at will, "and I am convinced
+that self-sacrifice--at least, indiscriminate, unreasoning self-
+sacrifice--is worse than useless, and to teach it is criminal ignorance.
+None of the so-called Christian virtues appeals to me: I hate humility.
+You haven't it.  The only happiness I can see in the world lies in self-
+expression, and I certainly shouldn't find that in sewing garments for
+the poor.
+
+"The last thing that I could wish for would be immortality as orthodox
+Christianity depicts it!  And suppose I had followed the advice of my
+Christian friends and remained here, where they insisted my duty was,
+what would have happened to me?  In a senseless self-denial I should
+gradually have, withered into a meaningless old maid, with no opinions
+of my own, and no more definite purpose in life than to write checks for
+charities.  Your Christianity commands that women shall stay at home, and
+declares that they are not entitled to seek their own salvation, to have
+any place in affairs, or to meddle with the realm of the intellect.
+Those forbidden gardens are reserved for the lordly sex.  St. Paul, you
+say, put us in our proper place some twenty centuries ago, and we are to
+remain there for all time."
+
+He felt sweeping through him the reverse current of hostility.
+
+"And what I preach," he asked, "has tended to confirm you in such a mean
+conception of Christianity?"
+
+Her eye travelled over the six feet of him--the kindling, reflecting eye
+of the artist; it rested for a moment on the protesting locks of his
+hair, which apparently could not be cut short enough to conform; on the
+hands, which were strong and sinewy; on the wide, tolerant mouth, with
+its rugged furrows, on the breadth and height of the forehead.  She lay
+for a moment, inert, considering.
+
+"What you preach--yes," she answered, bravely meeting his look.  "What
+you are--no.  You and your religion are as far apart as the poles.  Oh,
+this old argument, the belief that has been handed down to the man, the
+authority with which he is clothed, and not the man himself!  How can one
+be a factor in life unless one represents something which is the fruit of
+actual, personal experience?  Your authority is for the weak, the timid,
+the credulous,--for those who do not care to trust themselves, who run
+for shelter from the storms of life to a 'papier-mache' fortress, made to
+look like rock.  In order to preach that logically you should be a white
+ascetic, with a well-oiled manner, a downcast look lest you stumble in
+your pride; lest by chance you might do something original that sprang
+out of your own soul instead of being an imitation of the saints.  And if
+your congregation took your doctrine literally, I can see a whole army of
+white, meek Christians.  But you are not like that.  Can't you see it for
+yourself?"  she exclaimed.
+
+"Can't you feel that you are an individual, a personality, a force that
+might be put to great uses?  That will be because you are open-minded,
+because there is room in you for growth and change?"
+
+He strove with all his might to quell the inner conflagration which she
+had fanned into leaping flames.  Though he had listened before to doubt
+and criticism, this woman, with her strange shifting moods of calm and
+passion, with her bewildering faculty of changing from passive to active
+resistance, her beauty (once manifest, never to be forgotten), her unique
+individuality that now attracted, now repelled, seemed for the moment the
+very incarnation of the forces opposed to him and his religion.  Holder,
+as he looked at her, had a flash of fierce resentment that now, of all
+times, she should suddenly have flung herself across his path.  For she
+was to be reckoned with.  Why did he not tell her she was an egoist?  Why
+didn't he speak out, defend his faith, denounce her views as prejudiced
+and false?
+
+"Have I made you angry?" he heard her say.  "I am sorry."
+
+It was the hint of reproach in her tone to which the man in him instantly
+responded.  And what he saw now was his portrait she had painted.  The
+thought came to him: was he indeed greater, more vital than the religion
+he professed?  God forbid!  Did he ring true, and it false?
+
+She returned his gaze.  And gradually, under her clear olive skin, he saw
+the crimson colour mounting higher .  .  .  .  She put forth her hand,
+simply, naturally, and pressed his own, as though they had been friends
+for a lifetime .  .  .  .
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE MESSENGER IN THE CHURCH
+
+
+I
+
+The annual scourge of summer had descended pitilessly upon the city once
+more, enervating, depressing, stagnating, and people moved languidly in
+the penetrating heat that steamed from the pores of the surrounding river
+bottoms.
+
+The rector of St. John's realized that a crisis had come in his life,--
+a crisis he had tried to stave off in vain.  And yet there was a period
+during which he pursued his shrunken duties as though nothing had
+happened to him; as a man who has been struck in battle keeps on, loath
+to examine, to acknowledge the gravity of his wound; fearing to, perhaps.
+Sometimes, as his mind went back to the merciless conflict of his past,
+his experience at the law school, it was the unchaining of that other man
+he dreaded, the man he believed himself to have finally subdued.  But
+night and day he was haunted by the sorrowful and reproachful face of
+Truth.
+
+Had he the courage, now, to submit the beliefs which had sustained him
+all these years to Truth's inexorable inspection?  Did he dare to turn
+and open those books which she had inspired,--the new philosophies, the
+historical criticisms which he had neglected and condemned, which he had
+flattered himself he could do without,--and read of the fruit of
+Knowledge?  Twice, thrice he had hesitated on the steps of the big
+library, and turned away with a wildly beating heart.
+
+Day by day the storm increased, until from a cloud on the horizon it
+grew into a soul-shaking tempest.  Profoundly moved Parr's he had been on
+that Sunday afternoon, in Eldon Parr's garden, he had resolutely resolved
+to thrust the woman and the incident from his mind, to defer the
+consideration of the questions she had raised--grave though they were--to
+a calmer period.  For now he was unable to separate her, to eliminate the
+emotion--he was forced to acknowledge--the thought of her aroused, from
+the problems themselves.  Who was she?  At moments he seemed to see her
+shining, accusing, as Truth herself, and again as a Circe who had drawn
+him by subtle arts from his wanderings, luring him to his death; or, at
+other times, as the mutinous daughter of revolt.  But when he felt, in
+memory, the warm touch of her hand, the old wildness of his nature
+responded, he ceased to speculate or care, and he longed only to crush
+and subdue her by the brute power of the man in him.  For good or bad,
+she had woven her spell.
+
+Here was the old, elemental, twofold contest, carnal and spiritual,
+thoroughly revived!  .  .  .
+
+He recalled, in his musings, the little theological school surrounded
+by southern woods and fields, where he had sometime walked under autumn
+foliage with the elderly gentleman who had had such an influence on his
+life--the dean.  Mild-mannered and frail, patient in ordinary converse,
+--a lion for the faith.  He would have died for it as cheerfully as any
+martyr in history.  By the marvels of that faith Holder had beheld, from
+his pew in the chapel, the little man transformed.  He knew young men,
+their perplexities and temptations, and he dealt with them personally,
+like a father.  Holder's doubts were stilled, he had gained power of his
+temptations and peace for his soul, and he had gone forth inspired by the
+reminder that there was no student of whom the dean expected better
+things.  Where now were the thousands of which he had dreamed, and which
+he was to have brought into the Church?  .  .  .
+
+Now, he asked himself, was it the dean, or the dean's theology through
+which his regeneration had come?  Might not the inherent goodness of the
+dean be one thing, and his theology quite another?  Personality again!
+He recalled one of the many things which Alison Parr had branded on his
+memory,--"the belief, the authority in which the man is clothed, and not
+the man!"  The dean's God had remained silent on the subject of
+personality.  Or, at the best, he had not encouraged it; and there were--
+Hodder could not but perceive--certain contradictions in his character,
+which were an anomalistic blending of that of the jealous God of Moses
+and of the God of Christ.  There must be continuity--God could not
+change.  Therefore the God of infinite love must retain the wrath which
+visited sins of the fathers on the children, which demanded sacrifice,
+atonement,--an exact propitiation for his anger against mankind.  An
+innocent life of sorrow and suffering!
+
+And again, "You and your religion are as far apart as the poles!"  Had
+he, Hodder, outgrown the dean's religion, or had it ever been his own?
+Was there, after all, such a thing as religion?  Might it not be merely a
+figment of the fertile imagination of man?  He did not escape the terror
+of this thought when he paused to consider his labour of the past two
+years and the vanity of its results.  And little by little the feeling
+grew upon him, such being the state of his mind, that he ought not to
+continue, for the present at least, to conduct the services.  Should he
+resign, or go away for a while to some quiet place before he made such a
+momentous decision?  There was no one to whom he could turn; no layman,
+and no clergyman; not even the old bishop, whom he had more than once
+mentally accused of being, too broad and too tolerant!  No, he did not
+wish a clergyman's solution.  The significance of this thought flashed
+through him--that the world itself was no longer seeking clergymen's
+solutions.  He must go off alone, and submit his faith to the impartial
+test.
+
+It was in a vigil of the night, when he lay in the hot darkness, unable
+to sleep, that he came at length to this resolve.  And now that he had
+cut the knot he was too just to blame Alison Parr for having pointed out
+--with what often had seemed a pitiless cruelty--something of which he
+had had a constantly growing perception yet had continually sought to
+evade.  And he reviewed, as the church bells recorded the silent hours,
+how, little by little, his confidence had crumbled before the shocks of
+the successive revelations--some of them so slight that they had passed
+unnoticed: comparisons, inevitably compelled; Dalton Street; the
+confessions of Eleanor Goodrich and Mrs. Constable; Mr. Plimpton and his
+views of life--Eldon Parr!  Even the slamming of the carriage doors in
+Burton Street had had a significance!
+
+Might it not prove that this woman had let fall into the turbid waters of
+his soul the drop that was to clear them forever?  He would go away.  He
+would not see her again.
+
+Over the sleeping city, unapprehended, stole the dawn.
+
+He arose, but instead of falling on his knees he went to the window and
+lifted his face to the whitening sky .  .  .  .  Slowly out of the
+obscurity of the earth's shadow emerged the vague outlines of familiar
+things until they stood sharply material, in a silence as of death.  A
+sparrow twittered, and suddenly the familiar, soot-grimed roofs were
+bathed in light, and by a touch made beautiful .  .  .  .
+
+Some hours later the city was wide awake.  And Hodder, bathed and
+dressed, stood staring down from his study window into the street below,
+full now of young men and girls; some with set faces, hurrying, intent,
+others romping and laughing as they dodged the trucks and trolley cars;
+all on their way to the great shoe factory around the corner, the huge
+funnels of which were belching forth smoke into the morning air.  The
+street emptied, a bell rang, a whistle blew, the hum of distant machinery
+began .  .  .  .
+
+
+
+II
+
+Later that morning Hodder sat in his study.  The shutters were closed,
+and the intensity of the tropical glare without was softened and diffused
+by the slanting green slats.  His eye wandered over the long and
+comfortable room which had been his sanctuary in the feverish days of
+his ministry, resting affectionately on the hospitable chairs, the wide
+fireplace before which he had been wont to settle himself on winter
+nights, and even on the green matting--a cooling note in summer.  And
+there, in the low cases along the walls, were the rows of his precious
+books,--his one hobby and extravagance.  He had grown to love the room.
+Would he ever come back to it?
+
+A step sounded in the hall, a knock, and the well-known gaunt form and
+spectacled face of McCrae appeared in the doorway.
+
+"Ye wished to see me?"  he asked.
+
+"McCrae," said the rector, "I am going off for a while."
+
+His assistant regarded him a moment in silence.  Although Hodder had no
+intention of explaining his reasons, he had a curious conviction that it
+were superfluous to do so, that McCrae had guessed them.
+
+"Why shouldn't ye?  There's but a handful left to preach to in this
+weather."
+
+"I wouldn't go, in this sudden way, if it were not imperative," Hodder
+added, trying to speak calmly.
+
+"Why shouldn't ye?" McCrae repeated, almost fiercely.
+
+Hodder smiled in spite of himself.
+
+"There's no reason," he said, "except the added work put on you without
+warning, and in this heat."
+
+"Ye'll not need to worry," his assistant assured him, "the heat's nothing
+to me."  McCrae hesitated, and then demanded abruptly, "Ye'll not be
+visiting?"
+
+The question took Hodder by surprise.
+
+"No," he answered quickly, and not quite steadily, and hesitated in his
+turn, "I shan't be visiting."
+
+"It's a rest ye need, I've been wanting to say it."  McCrae took a step
+forward, and for a moment it seemed as though he were at last about to
+break the bonds of his reserve.  Perhaps he detected an instinctive
+shrinking on the rector's part.  At any rate, there was another instant
+of silence, in which the two men faced each other across the desk, and
+McCrae held out his hand.  "Good luck to ye," he said, as Hodder took it,
+"and don't have the pariah on your mind.  Stay till ye're rested, and
+come back to us."
+
+He left the room abruptly.  Hodder remained motionless, looking after
+him, and then, moved apparently by a sudden impulse, started toward the
+door,--only to halt and turn before he got to it.  Almost he had opened
+his lips to call his assistant back.  He could not do it--the moment had
+come and fled when it might have been possible.  Did this man hide, under
+his brusqueness and brevity of speech, the fund of wisdom and the wider
+sympathy and understanding he suspected?  Hodder could have vouched for
+it, and yet he had kept his own counsel.  And he was struck suddenly by
+the significance of the fact, often remarked, that McCrae in his brief
+and common-sense and by no means enlivening sermons had never once
+referred in any way to doctrine or dogma!
+
+He spent half an hour in collecting and bestowing in two large valises
+such articles as his simple needs would demand, and then set out for a
+railroad office in the business portion of the city, where he bought his
+ticket and berth.  Then, after a moment of irresolution on the threshold
+of the place, he turned to the right, thrusting his way through the
+sluggish crowds on Tower Street until he came to the large bookstore
+where he had been want to spend, from time to time, some of his leisure
+moments.  A clerk recognized him, and was about to lead the way to the
+rear, where the precious editions were kept, when Hodder stopped him.
+
+In casting about for a beginning in his venture over unknown seas, there
+had naturally come into his mind three or four works which were anathema
+to the orthodox; one of which, in seven volumes, went back to his
+seminary days, and had been the subject of a ringing, denunciatory sermon
+by the dean himself.  Three of them were by Germans of established
+reputations, another by a professor of the University of Paris.  The
+habit of years is strong.
+
+And though he knew that many clergymen read these books, Hodder found it
+impossible to overcome a nervous sense of adventure,--nay (knowing his
+resolution), of apostasy, almost of clandestine guilt when he mentioned
+them.  And it seemed to him that the face of the clerk betrayed surprise.
+One of the works was not in stock; he would send the others that
+afternoon.  Mr. Hodder would take them?  They made a formidable parcel,
+but a little handle was supplied and the rector hurried out, swinging
+himself on a Tower Street car.
+
+It must not be thought that the whole of what is called modern criticism
+was new to Hodder.  This would indeed be too much of a reflection on the
+open-mindedness of the seminary from which he had graduated.  But he
+found himself, now, pondering a little cynically on that "open-
+mindedness"; on that concession--if it had been a concession--to the
+methods of science.  There had been in truth a course of lectures on this
+subject; but he saw now, very clearly, what a concerted effort had been
+put forward in the rest of the teaching to minimize and discredit it.
+Even the professor who gave the lectures had had the air of deploring
+them.  Here it is, but on the whole one would better let it alone,--such
+was the inference.  And he had let it alone, through all these years.
+
+In the seminary, too, volumes by semi-learned clergymen had been thrust
+into his hands, efforts which Hodder recalled now, in spite of his mental
+state, with a smile.  These invariably championed the doctrine of the
+virgin birth as the pillar on which the Incarnation depended.
+A favourite argument declared that although the Gospel texts in regard to
+it might be proven untrustworthy, the miraculous birth must have happened
+anyway!  And one of these clerical authors whom he had more recently
+read, actually had had the audacity to turn the weapons of the archenemy,
+science, back upon itself.  The virgin birth was an established fact in
+nature, and had its place in the social economy of the bee.  And did not
+parthenogenesis occur in the silk moth?
+
+In brief, the conclusion impressed upon him by his seminary instruction
+was this: that historical criticism had corrected some ideas and put
+some things in their right place.  What these things were remained
+sufficiently vague.  But whenever it attacked a cherished dogma it was,
+on general principles, wrong.
+
+Once again in his cool study, he cut the cord with a trembling hand, and
+while he was eating the lunch his housekeeper had prepared, dipped into
+one of the larger volumes.  As he read again the critical disproofs he
+felt an acute, almost physical pain, as though a vital part of him were
+being cut away, as his mind dwelt upon those beautiful legends to which
+he had so often turned, and which had seemed the very fountain of his
+faith.  Legends! . . . .
+
+He closed the book.  The clock on the mantel struck three; his train was
+to leave at five.  He rose and went down into the silent church he had
+grown to love, seating himself in one of the carved stalls of the choir,
+his eye lingering in turn on each beautiful object: on the glowing
+landscape in the window in memory of Eliza Parr, portraying the
+delectable country, with the bewildered yet enraptured faces of the
+pilgrims in the foreground; on the graceful, shining lectern, the
+aspiring arches, the carved marble altar behind the rail, and above
+it the painting of the Christ on the cross.
+
+The hours of greatest suffering are the empty hours.  'Eloi, Eloi, lama
+sabachthani?'  The hours when the mysterious sustaining and driving force
+is withdrawn, and a lassitude and despair comes over us like that of a
+deserted child: the hours when we feel we have reached the limit of
+service, when our brief span of usefulness is done.  Had God brought him,
+John Hodder, to the height of the powers of his manhood only to abandon
+him, to cast him adrift on the face of the waters--led him to this great
+parish, with all its opportunities, only that he might fail and flee?
+
+He sat staring at the face of the Man on the cross.  Did he, in his
+overwrought state, imagine there an expression he had never before
+remarked, or had the unknown artist of the seventies actually risen above
+the mediocrity of the figure in his portrayal of the features of the
+Christ?  The rector started, and stared again.  There was no weakness in
+the face, no meekness, no suggestion of the conception of the sacrificed
+Lamb, no hint of a beatific vision of opening heavens--and yet no
+accusation, no despair.  A knowing--that were nearer--a knowing of all
+things through the experiencing of all things, the suffering of all
+things.  For suffering without revelation were vain, indeed!  A perfected
+wisdom that blended inevitably with a transcendent love.  Love and wisdom
+were one, then?  To reach comprehension through conquering experience was
+to achieve the love that could exclaim, "they know not what they do!"
+
+Human or divine?  Man or God?  Hodder found himself inwardly repeating
+the words, the controversy which had raged for nineteen hundred years,
+and not yet was stilled.  Perfection is divine.  Human!  Hodder repeated
+the word, as one groping on the threshold of a great discovery .  .  .  .
+
+
+
+III
+
+He was listening--he had for a long time been listening to a sound which
+had seemed only the natural accompaniment of the drama taking place in
+his soul, as though some inspired organist were expressing in exquisite
+music the undercurrent of his agony.  Only gradually did he become aware
+that it arose from the nave of the church, and, turning, his eyes fell
+upon the bowed head and shoulders of a woman kneeling in one of the pews.
+She was sobbing.
+
+His movement, he recalled afterward, did not come of a conscious
+volition, as he rose and descended the chancel steps and walked toward
+her; he stood for what seemed a long time on the white marble of the
+aisle looking down on her, his heart wrung by the violence of her grief,
+which at moments swept through her like a tempest.  She seemed still
+young, but poverty had marked her with unmistakable signs.  The white,
+blue-veined hands that clung to the railing of the pew were thin; and the
+shirtwaist, though clean, was cheap and frayed.  At last she rose from
+her knees and raised a tear-stained face to his, staring at him in a dumb
+bewilderment.
+
+"Can I do anything for you?" he said gently, "I am the rector here."
+She did not answer, but continued to stare uncomprehendingly.  He sat
+down beside her in the pew.
+
+"You are in trouble," he said.  "Will you let me try to help you?"
+A sob shook her--the beginning of a new paroxysm.  He waited patiently
+until it was over.  Suddenly she got rather wildly and unsteadily to her
+feet.
+
+"I must go!" she cried.  "Oh, God, what would I do if--if he wasn't
+there?"
+
+Hodder rose too.  She had thrust herself past him into the aisle, but if
+he had not taken her arm she would have fallen.  Thus they went together
+to the door of the church, and out into the white, burning sunlight.  In
+spite of her weakness she seemed actually to be leading him, impelled by
+a strange force arid fled down the steps of the porch to the sidewalk.
+And there she paused, seeing him still beside her.  Fortunately he had
+his hat in his hand.
+
+"Where are you going?" she asked.
+
+"To take you home," he replied firmly, "you ought not to go alone."
+
+A look of something like terror came into her eyes.
+
+"Oh, no!" she protested, with a vehemence that surprised him.  "I am
+strong.  Oh, thank you, sir,--but I can go alone.  It's Dicky--my little
+boy.  I've never left him so long.  I had gone for the medicine and I saw
+the church.  I used to go to church, sir, before we had our troubles--and
+I just went in.  It suddenly came over me that God might help me--the
+doctor can do nothing."
+
+"I will go with you," he said.
+
+She ceased to resist, as one submitting to the fatality of a superior
+will.
+
+The pavements that afternoon, as Hodder and the forlorn woman left the
+cool porticoes of St. John's, were like the floor of a stone oven, and
+the work horses wore little bonnets over their heads.  Keeping to the
+shady side, the rector and his companion crossed Tower Street with its
+trolley cars and its awninged stores, and came to that depressing
+district which had reproached him since the first Sunday of his ministry
+when he had traversed it with Eldon Parr.  They passed the once
+prosperous houses, the corner saloons pandering to two vices, decked with
+the flamboyant signs of the breweries.  The trees were dying along the
+asphalt and in the yards, the iron fences broken here and there, the
+copings stained with rust and soot.  Hodder's thoughts might have been
+likened to the heated air that simmered above the bricks.
+
+They were in Dalton Street!  She seemed to have forgotten his presence,
+her pace quickened as she turned into a gate and flew up a flight of
+dirty stone steps, broken and sagging.  Hodder took in, subconsciously,
+that the house was a dingy grey, of three stories and a Mansard roof,
+with a bay window on the yard side, and a fly-blown sign, "Rooms to Rent"
+hanging in one window.  Across the street, on a lot that had once held a
+similar dignified residence, was the yellow brick building of the "Albert
+Hotel," and next door, on the east, a remodelled house of "apartments"
+with speaking tubes in the doorway.
+
+The woman led him up another flight of steps to the open door of
+the house, through a hallway covered with a ragged carpet, where a
+dilapidated walnut hat-rack stood, up the stairs, threading a dark
+passage that led into a low-ceiled, stifling room at the very back.
+A stout, slatternly person in a wrapper rose as they entered, but the
+mother cast herself down beside the lounge where the child was.  Hodder
+had a moment of fear that she was indeed too late, so still the boy lay,
+so pathetically wan was the little face and wasted the form under the
+cotton nightgown.  The mother passed her hand across his forehead.
+
+"Dicky!" she whispered fearfully, "Dicky!"
+
+He opened his eyes and smiled at her; feebly.
+
+The, stout woman, who had been looking on with that intensity of sympathy
+of which the poor are capable, began waving gently the palm-leaf fan.
+She was German.
+
+"He is so good, is Dicky.  He smile at me when I fan him--once, twice.
+He complains not at all."
+
+The mother took the fan from her, hand.
+
+"Thank you for staying with him, Mrs. Breitmann.  I was gone longer than
+I expected."  The fact that the child still lived, that she was again in
+his presence, the absorbing act of caring for him seemed to have calmed
+her.
+
+"It is nothing, what I do," answered Mrs. Breitmann, and turned away
+reluctantly, the tears running on her cheeks.  "When you go again, I come
+always, Mrs. Garvin.  Ach!"
+
+Her exclamation was caused by the sight of the tall figure and black coat
+of the rector, and as she left the room, Mrs. Garvin turned.  And he
+noticed in her eyes the same expression of dread they had held when she
+had protested against his coming.
+
+"Please don't think that I'm not thankful--" she faltered.
+
+"I am not offering you charity," he said.  "Can you not take from other
+human beings what you have accepted from this woman who has just left?"
+
+"Oh, sir, it isn't that!" she cried, with a look of trust, of appeal that
+was new, "I would do anything--I will do anything.  But my husband--he is
+so bitter against the church, against ministers!  If he came home and
+found you here--"
+
+"I know--many people feel that way," he assented, "too many.  But you
+cannot let a prejudice stand in the way of saving the boy's life, Mrs.
+Garvin."
+
+"It is more than that.  If you knew, sir--"
+
+"Whatever it is," he interrupted, a little sternly, "it must not
+interfere.  I will talk to your husband."
+
+She was silent, gazing at him now questioningly, yet with the dawning
+hope of one whose strength is all but gone, and who has found at last a
+stronger to lean upon,
+
+The rector took the fan from her arrested hand and began to ply it.
+
+"Listen, Mrs. Garvin.  If you had come to the church half an hour later,
+I should have been leaving the city for a place far distant."
+
+"You were going away?  You stayed on my account?"
+
+"I much prefer to stay, if I can be of any use, and I think I can.  I am
+sure I can.  What is the matter with the child?"
+
+"I don't know, sir--he just lies there listless and gets thinner and
+thinner and weaker and weaker.  Sometimes he feels sick, but not often.
+The doctor don't seem to know."
+
+What doctor have you?"
+
+"His name is Welling.  He's around the corner."
+
+"Exactly," said the rector.  "This is a case for Dr. Jarvis, who is the
+best child specialist in the city.  He is a friend of mine, and I intend
+to send for him at once.  And the boy must go to a hospital--"
+
+"Oh, I couldn't, sir."
+
+He had a poignant realization of the agony behind the cry.  She breathed
+quickly through her parted lips, and from the yearning in her tired eyes
+--as she gazed at the poor little form--he averted his glance.
+
+"Now, Mrs. Garvin, you must be sensible," he said.  "This is no place for
+a sick child.  And it is such a nice little hospital, the one I have in
+mind, and so many children get well and strong there," he added,
+cheerfully.
+
+"He wouldn't hear of it."  Hodder comprehended that she was referring to
+her husband.  She added inconsequently: "If I let him go, and he never
+came back!  Oh, I couldn't do it--I couldn't."
+
+He saw that it was the part of wisdom not to press her, to give her time
+to become accustomed to the idea.  Come back--to what?  His eye wandered
+about the room, that bespoke the last shifts of poverty, for he knew that
+none but the desperate were driven to these Dalton Street houses, once
+the dwellings of the well-to-do, and all the more pitiful for the
+contrast.  The heated air reeked with the smell of stale cooking.
+There was a gas stove at one side, a linoleum-covered table in the
+centre, littered with bottles, plates, and pitchers, a bed and chairs
+which had known better days, new obviously bruised and battered by many
+enforced movings.  In one corner was huddled a little group of toys.
+
+He was suddenly and guiltily aware that the woman had followed his
+glance.
+
+"We had them in Alder Street," she said.  "We might have been there yet,
+if we hadn't been foolish.  It's a pretty street, sir--perhaps you know
+it--you take the Fanshawe Avenue cars to Sherman Heights.  The air is
+like the country there, and all the houses are new, and Dicky had a yard
+to play in, and he used to be so healthy and happy in it.  .  .  We were
+rich then,--not what you'd call rich," she added apologetically, "but we
+owned a little home with six rooms, and my husband had a good place as
+bookkeeper in a grocery house, and every year for ten years we put
+something by, and the boy came.  We never knew how well off we were,
+until it was taken away from us, I guess.  And then Richard--he's my
+husband--put his savings into a company--he thought it was so safe, and
+we were to get eight per cent--and the company failed, and he fell sick
+and lost his place, and we had to sell the house, and since he got well
+again he's been going around trying for something else.  Oh, he's tried
+so hard,--every day, and all day long.  You wouldn't believe it, sir.
+And he's so proud.  He got a job as porter, but he wasn't able to hold
+it--he wasn't strong enough.  That was in April.  It almost broke my
+heart to see him getting shabby--he used to look so tidy.  And folks
+don't want you when you're shabby."  .  .  .
+
+There sprang to Hodder's mind a sentence in a book he had recently read:
+"Our slums became filled with sick who need never have been sick; with
+derelicts who need never have been abandoned."
+
+Suddenly, out of the suffocating stillness of the afternoon a woman's
+voice was heard singing a concert-hall air, accompanied by a piano played
+with vigour and abandon.  And Hodder, following the sound, looked out
+across the grimy yard--to a window in the apartment house opposite.
+
+"There's that girl again," said the mother, lifting her head.  "She does
+sing nice, and play, poor thing!  There was a time when I wouldn't have
+wanted to listen.  But Dicky liked it so .  .  .  .  It's the very tune
+he loved.  He don't seem to hear it now.  He don't even ask for Mr.
+Bentley any more."
+
+"Mr. Bentley?" the rector repeated.  The name was somehow familiar to
+him.
+
+The piano and the song ceased abruptly, with a bang.
+
+"He lives up the street here a way--the kindest old gentleman you ever
+saw.  He always has candy in his pockets for the children, and it's a
+sight to see them follow him up and down the sidewalk.  He takes them to
+the Park in the cars on Saturday afternoons.  That was all Dicky could
+think about at first--would he be well enough to go with Mr. Bentley by
+Saturday?  And he was forever asking me to tell Mr. Bentley he was sick.
+I saw the old gentleman on the street to-day, and I almost went up to
+him.  But I hadn't the courage."
+
+The child moaned, stirred, and opened his eyes, gazing at them
+feverishly, yet without seeming comprehension.  She bent over him,
+calling his name .  .  .  .  Hodder thrust the fan into her hand, and
+rose.
+
+"I am going to telephone Dr. Jarvis," he said, "and then I shall come
+back, in order to be here when he arrives."
+
+She looked up at him.
+
+"Oh, thank you, sir,--I guess it's for the best--"
+
+Her voice died away, and the rector, seeking for the cause, saw that a
+man had entered the room.  He walked up to the couch and stood for a
+moment staring moodily at the child, while the woman watched him,
+transfixed.
+
+"Richard!" she said.
+
+He paid no attention to her.  She turned to Hodder.  "This is my husband,
+sir. . . .  Richard, I went into the church--just for a moment--I--I
+couldn't help it, and this gentleman--the minister--came home with me.
+He wanted to--he thought I was sick.  And now he's going out to get the
+best doctor in the city for Dicky."
+
+The man turned suddenly and confronted the rector.
+
+"Why don't you let him die, you and your church people?"  he asked.
+"You've done your worst to kill him."
+
+The woman put her hand fearfully, imploringly on the man's arm.
+
+"Richard!" she whispered.
+
+But as Hodder glanced from the derelict beside him a wave of
+comprehension passed through him that swept him clean of indignation,
+of resentment.  And this man had been prosperous and happy!
+
+"There is but one way to save the boy's life, Mr. Garvin," he said, "and
+that is to put him in charge of Dr. Jarvis."
+
+The man made no reply, but went over to the window, staring out into the
+yard.  There was something vaguely ominous in his attitude.  The rector
+watched him a moment, and then turned to the mother.
+
+"You must not lose hope," he told her.
+
+She looked at him with terror-stricken eyes that sought to be grateful.
+He had picked up his hat from a corner of the littered table, and started
+to leave, when Garvin, by a sudden movement, planted himself in the
+doorway.  Whether he had been drinking, or whether he were merely crazed
+by misfortune and the hopeless search in the heat for employment, and by
+lack of proper nourishment, Hodder could not say.  There was a light in
+his eyes like that in a wounded animal's; and although he was thin and
+slight, he had the concentrated power of desperation.
+
+"Say, what church do you come from?" he demanded.
+
+"From St. John's," said the rector.
+
+"Eldon Parr's church?"
+
+Hodder started, in spite of himself, at the name.
+
+"Mr. Parr is a member of the congregation."
+
+"Come off!  He owns it and runs it, the same as he does everything else
+in this town.  Maybe you don't think I read the Sunday papers.  Say, I
+was respectable once, and had a good place.  You wouldn't believe it,
+would you?"
+
+Hodder hesitated.  There was obviously no way to pass the man except by
+using physical force.
+
+"If you have anything to say to me, Mr. Garvin, I shall be glad to talk
+to you later.  You must not stop me now," he said with a touch of
+severity.
+
+"You'll listen to me, right here and now," cried Garvin.  "If you think I
+am going to let Eldon Parr's minister, or any one else belonging to him,
+save that boy's life, you've got another guess comin'.  That's all.  I'd
+rather have him die--d'ye hear?  I'd rather have him die."
+
+The woman behind them whimpered .  .  .  .  The name was ringing like a
+knell in Hodder's head--Eldon Parr!  Coming, as it had, like a curse from
+the lips of this wretched, half-demented creature, it filled his soul
+with dismay.  And the accusation had in it the profound ring of truth.
+He was Eldon Parr's minister, and it was Eldon Parr who stood between him
+and his opportunity.
+
+"Why do you speak of Mr. Parr?" he asked, though the question cost him a
+supreme effort.
+
+"Why do I speak of him?  My God, because he ruined me.  If it hadn't been
+for him, damn him, I'd have a home, and health and happiness to-day, and
+the boy would be well and strong instead of lying there with the life all
+but gone out of him.  Eldon Parr did for me, and now he's murdered my
+son--that's why I mention him."
+
+In the sudden intensity of his feeling, Hodder seized Garvin by the arms
+--arms that were little more than skin and bone.  The man might be
+crazed, he might be drunk: that he believed what he was saying there
+could be no question.  He began to struggle violently, but the rector was
+strong.
+
+"Be still," he commanded.  And suddenly, overcome less by the physical
+power than by the aspect of the clergyman, an expression of bewilderment
+came into his eyes, and he was quiet.  Hodder dropped his arms.  "I do
+not intend to go until I hear what you have to say.  It would be useless,
+at any rate, since your child's life is at stake.  Tell me how Mr. Parr
+has ruined you."
+
+Garvin stared at him, half in suspicion, half in amazement.
+
+"I guess you never knew of his ruining anybody, did you?" he demanded
+sullenly.  "Well, I'll tell you all right, and you can go and tell him.
+He won't care much--he's used to it by this time, and he gets square with
+God by his churches and charities.  Did you ever hear of a stock called
+Consolidated Tractions?"
+
+Consolidated Tractions!  In contrast to the sordid misery and degradation
+of this last refuge of the desperate Hodder saw the lofty, panelled
+smoking room at Francis Ferguson's, and was listening again to Wallis
+Plimpton's cynical amusement as to how he and Everett Constable and Eldon
+Parr himself had "gat out" before the crash; "got out" with all the money
+of the wretch who now stood before him!  His parishioners!  his
+Christians!  Oh God!
+
+The man was speaking in his shrill voice.
+
+"Well, I was a Traction sucker, all right, and I guess you wouldn't have
+to walk more than two blocks to find another in this neighbourhood.  You
+think Eldon Parr's a big, noble man, don't you?  You're proud to run his
+church, ain't you?  You wouldn't believe there was a time when I thought
+he was a big man, when I was kind of proud to live in the same city with
+him.  She'll tell you how I used to come home from the store and talk
+about him after supper, and hope that the kid there would grow up into a
+financier like Eldon Parr.  The boys at the store talked about him: he
+sort of laid hold on our imaginations with the library he gave, and
+Elmwood Park, and the picture of the big organ in your church in the
+newspapers--and sometimes, Mary and me and the boy, in the baby carriage,
+on Sunday afternoons we used to walk around by his house, just to look at
+it.  You couldn't have got me to believe that Eldon Parr would put his
+name to anything that wasn't straight.
+
+"Then Consolidated Tractions came along, with Parr's, name behind it.
+Everybody was talking about it, and how it was payin' eight per cent.
+from the start, and extra dividends and all, and what a marvel of finance
+it was.  Before the kid came, as soon as I married her, we began to save
+up for him.  We didn't go to the theatres or nothing.  Well, I put it
+all, five thousand dollars, into Consolidated.  She'll tell you how we
+sat up half the night after we got the first dividend talking about how
+we'd send the kid to college, and after we went to bed we couldn't sleep.
+It wasn't more than a year after that we began to hear things--and we
+couldn't sleep for sure, and the dividends stopped and the stock tumbled.
+Even then I wouldn't believe it of him, that he'd take poor people's
+money that way when he had more than he knew what to do with.  I made up
+my mind if I went down to see him and told him about it, he'd make it
+right.  I asked the boss for an hour off, and headed for the Parr
+building--I've been there as much as fifty times since--but he don't
+bother with small fry.  The clerks laugh when they see me comin' .  .  .
+I got sick worryin', and when I was strong enough to be around they'd
+filled my job at the grocery, and it wasn't long before we had to move
+out of our little home in Alder Street.  We've been movin' ever since,"
+he cried, and tears of weakness were in his eyes, "until we've come to
+this, and we'll have to get out of here in another week.  God knows where
+we'll go then."
+
+Hodder shuddered.
+
+"Then I found out how he done it--from a lawyer.  The lawyer laughed at
+me, too.  Say, do you wonder I ain't got much use for your church people?
+Parr got a corporation lawyer named Langmaid--he's another one of your
+millionnaire crooks--to fix it up and get around the law and keep him out
+of jail.  And then they had to settle with Tim Beatty for something like
+three hundred thousand.  You know who Beatty is--he owns this city--his
+saloon's around here on Elm Street.  All the crooks had to be squared.
+Say," he demanded aggressively, "are Parr and Langmaid any better than
+Beatty, or any of the hold-up men Beatty covers?  There's a street-walker
+over there in those flats that's got a million times more chance to get
+to heaven--if there is any--than those financiers, as they call 'emselves
+--I ain't much on high finance, but I've got some respect for a second
+story man now--he takes some risks!  I'll tell you what they did, they
+bought up the short car lines that didn't pay and sold 'em to themselves
+for fifty times as much as they were worth; and they got controlling
+interests in the big lines and leased 'em to themselves with dividends
+guaranteed as high as eighteen per cent.  They capitalized the
+Consolidated for more millions than a little man like me can think of,
+and we handed 'em our money because we thought they were honest.  We
+thought the men who listed the stock on the Exchange were honest.  And
+when the crash came, they'd got away with the swag, like any common
+housebreakers.  There were dummy directors, and a dummy president.  Eldon
+Parr didn't have a share--sold out everything when she went over two
+hundred, but you bet he kept his stock in the leased lines, which
+guarantee more than they earn.  He cleaned up five million, they say....
+My money--the money that might give that boy fresh air, and good doctors
+....Say, you believe in hell, don't you?  You tell Eldon Parr to keep his
+charity,--he can't send any of it in here.  And you'd better go back to
+that church of his and pray to keep his soul out of hell."  .  .  .
+
+His voice, which had risen even to a higher pitch, fell silent.  And all
+at once, without warning, Garvin sank, or rather tumbled upon the bed,
+sobbing in a way that was terrible to see.  The wife stole across the
+room, sat down beside him, and laid her hand on his shoulder. . . .
+
+In spite of the intensity of his own anguish, Hodder was conscious of a
+curious detachment; and for months afterward particular smells, the sight
+of a gasoline stove, a certain popular tune gave him a sharp twinge of
+pain.  The acid distilling in his soul etched the scene, the sounds, the
+odours forever in his memory: a stale hot wind from the alley rattled the
+shutter-slats, and blew the door to; the child stirred; and above the
+strident, irregular weeping rose main, in ironical contrast, the piano
+and the voice across the yard.  In that glimpse he had into the heart of
+life's terrible mystery he momentarily understood many things: he knew
+that behind the abandon of the woman's song was the same terror which
+reigned in the room in which he stood .  .  .  .
+
+There were voices in the passageway without, a woman saying in a German
+accent,--"It is here, sir."
+
+There was a knock at the door .  .  .  .
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE LOST PARISHIONER
+
+
+I
+
+Hodder opened the door.  In the dingy passageway he perceived a tall
+figure which immediately turned out to be that of an old gentleman.  In
+spite of the heat, he wore a long coat and an old-fashioned, high collar,
+a black tie, under which was exposed a triangle of immaculate, pleated
+linen.  In one hand he held a gold-headed stick, a large tall hat of
+which the silk nap was a little rubbed, a string sustaining a parcel, the
+brown paper wrapping of which was soaked: in the other, a manila bag
+containing lemons.
+
+His head was bent forward a little, the high dome of it was bald,
+but the white hair clustered thickly behind the temples.  The face was
+clean-shaven, the cheeks touched with red, the nose high and dominating,
+distinctly philanthropic.  And the blue eyes rested on the clergyman with
+a benevolence unfeigned.
+
+"Good afternoon, sir," the old gentleman said; "I am told Mrs. Garvin
+lives here."
+
+Before the rector could reply Mrs. Garvin herself stood between them.
+
+"It's Mr. Bentley!" she exclaimed.
+
+"I fear I'm intruding, ma'am," he said.  "But some of Dicky's little
+friends have just informed me that he is ill, and I have taken the
+liberty of calling to inquire."
+
+Mr. Bentley entered the room,--simple words to express that which was
+in some sort an event.  He laid his parcels on the table, his hat and
+stick on a chair, and stood looking down in silence at the thin little
+form on the couch.  Presently he turned.
+
+"I'm afraid he's very ill, ma'am," he said gently.  "You have your own
+doctor, no doubt.  But if you will permit me, as a friend, to make a
+suggestion, we have in the city one of the best child specialists in the
+United States, who is never weary of curing these little ones,--Dr.
+Jarvis, and I shall be happy to ask him to come and see Dicky."
+
+Mrs. Garvin glanced at Hodder, who came forward.
+
+"I was just about to telephone for Dr. Jarvis, Mr. Bentley, when you
+arrived.  I am Mr. Hodder, of St. John's."
+
+"How do you do, sir?" The kindly eyes, alight with a gentle flame, rested
+upon the rugged figure of the rector.  "I am glad that you, too, agree
+that Dr. Jarvis is advisable, Mr. Hodder."
+
+There was a sound from the bed.  Garvin had got to his feet and was
+staring wildly, with reddened lids.
+
+"Are you Horace Bentley?"  he demanded.
+
+"That is my name, sir," Mr. Bentley replied.  His expression of surprise
+was only momentary.  And in all his life Hodder had never beheld a
+greater contrast in human beings than between that gracious and courtly
+old man and the haggard, unkempt, unshaved, and starving outcast facing
+him.  Something like a film came over Garvin's eyes.
+
+"He ruined you, too, twenty years back--Eldon Parr did for you, too.  Oh,
+I know his record, I've followed his trail--he got all the Grantham stock
+that would have made you a millionnaire!"
+
+"Ah," replied Mr. Bentley, smiling to humour him, "that's something I
+have no wish to be, sir,--a millionaire."  He met the frightened gaze of
+the wife.  "Good day, ma'am.  If you will allow me, I'll come to-morrow
+morning to learn what Dr. Jarvis will have had to say.  Have courage,
+ma'am, have courage.  You may have faith in Dr. Jarvis."
+
+The poor woman was incapable of speech.  Mr. Bentley picked up his hat
+and stick.
+
+"I've taken the liberty of bringing Dicky a little ice and a few lemons."
+His eyes rested again on the couch by the window.  Then he turned to
+Garvin, who stood mutely, staring.  "Good evening, sir," he said.
+"We must look for the best."
+
+
+
+II
+
+They went down the stairs of the shabby and battered house, stairs by the
+side of which holes had been knocked through the faded wall-paper--scars
+of frequent movings.  The sound and smell of frying came out of the open
+door of what once had been the parlour, and on the front steps a little
+girl darted past them with a pitcher of beer.  When they reached the
+sidewalk Mr. Bentley halted.
+
+"If you were intending to telephone Dr. Jarvis, Mr. Hodder, there is a
+public station in the drug store just above here.  I know that clergymen
+are busy persons, and I am passing it, if you are pressed for time."
+
+"My only concern is to get Jarvis here," said the rector.
+"If I may go with you--"
+
+Once again in the hot sunlight, reaction had set in.  Hodder was suddenly
+unstrung, and the kindly old gentleman beside him seemed for the instant
+the only fixture in a chaotic universe.  It was not until later
+reflection that he realized Mr. Bentley might, by an intuitive sympathy,
+a depth of understanding, have drained something of his state, since the
+incidents which followed were to be accounted for on no other grounds.
+In such elemental moments the frail conventions are swept away: Mr.
+Bentley, whoever he might be, was no longer a stranger; and it seemed
+wholly natural to be walking with him up the street, to hear him saying,
+--not with perfunctory politeness but in a tone that was itself an
+invitation,--"With pleasure, sir, we'll go together.  And let us trust
+that the doctor will be at home."
+
+Nor did Hodder stop to wonder, then, why Mr. Bentley should have sought
+in his conversation to dissipate something of the hideous blackness of a
+tragedy which must have moved him profoundly.  How fortunate, he
+declared, that they should have arrived before it was too late!  For
+it was plain to be seen that these Garvins were good people who had been
+broken by adversity .  .  .  .  The boy had struck him particularly--a
+lovable, merry little fellow whose clothes, Mr. Bentley observed, were
+always neatly mended, betokening a mother with self-respect and
+character.  He even spoke of Garvin: adversity, worry, the heat, constant
+brooding over a happier past and an uncertain future--was it surprising
+that the poor man's mind had become unhinged?  They must make some plan
+for Garvin, said Mr. Bentley, get the man and his wife into the country
+for a while amongst kindly people.  This might no doubt be arranged....
+
+"Here we are, sir."
+
+The familiar smell of drugs, the sound of the trickling water in the soda
+fountain roused Hodder to reality, to action, and he hurried into the
+telephone booth, fumbled in the dog-eared book, got Dr. Jarvis's number
+and called it.  An eternity seemed to elapse before he had a reply, heard
+his coin jangling in the bog, recognized the voice of the great doctor's
+secretary.  Yes, the doctor was in would he speak to Mr. Hodder, of St.
+John's?  .  .  .  An interval, during which Hodder was suddenly struck
+with this designation of himself.  Was he still of St. John's, then?  An
+aeon might have elapsed since he had walked down the white marble of its
+aisle toward the crouching figure in the pew.  He was not that man, but
+another--and still Mr. Hodder, of St. John's.  .  .  .  Then he heard the
+specialist say, "Hello, Mr. Hodder, what can I do for you?"  Heard his
+own voice in reply, explaining the case.  Could the doctor find time?
+The doctor could: he was never too busy to attend to the poor,--though he
+did not say so: he would be there--by half-past six.  The rector hung up
+the receiver, opened the door of the booth and mopped his brow, for the
+heat was stifling.
+
+"The doctor will go," he explained in answer to Mr. Bentley's inquiring
+look.
+
+"Now, sir," said the old gentleman, when they were out of the store, "we
+have done all that we can for the time being.  I do not live far from
+here.  Perhaps you would give me the pleasure of taking supper with me,
+if you have no other engagement."
+
+No other engagement!  Not until then did Hodder remember his empty rooms
+in the parish house, and the train which was to have borne him away from
+all this already speeding northward.  He accepted gratefully, nor did he
+pause to speculate upon the mystery by which the stream of his life
+seemed so suddenly to have been diverted.  He had, indeed, no sense of
+mystery in the presence of this splendidly sane, serene old man, any more
+than the children who ran after him from the dingy yards and passages,
+calling his name, clinging to the skirts of his coat.  These accepted
+him simply as an anomalous fact in their universe, grinned at his
+pleasantries, and held up grimy little hands for the kidney-shaped candy
+beans he drew forth from his capacious pockets.  In the intervals he
+reminisced to the rector about the neighbourhood.
+
+"It seems but a short while ago when the trees met overhead--magnificent
+trees they were.  The asphalt and the soot killed them.  And there were
+fruit trees in that yard"--he pointed with his stick to a littered sun
+parched plot adjoining a battered mansion--"all pink and white with
+blossoms in the spring.  Mr. Hadley lived there--one of our forgotten
+citizens.  He is dead and gone now and his family scattered.  That other
+house, where the boy lies, belonged to Mr. Villars, a relation of the
+Atterbury family, and I can recall very well a little girl with a pink
+sash and a white dress who used to come running out to meet me with
+flowers in her hands.  Incredible as it may seem, she picked them in that
+yard.  I thought of her as I went in, how fresh and happy she used to be,
+and what a different place this was for children then.  She must have
+some of her own by this time."
+
+The character of the street had changed to what might be called shabby-
+genteel, and they stopped before a three-story brick house--one of a row
+--that showed signs of scrupulous care.  The steps were newly scrubbed,
+the woodwork neatly painted.
+
+"This is where I live, sir," said Mr. Bentley, opening the door with a
+latchkey and leading the way into a high room on the right, darkened and
+cool, and filled with superb, old-fashioned rosewood furniture.  It was
+fitted up as a library, with tall shelves reaching almost to the ceiling.
+
+An old negro appeared, dressed in a swallow-tailed coat.  His hair was as
+white as his master's, and his face creased with age.
+
+"Sam," said Mr. Bentley, "I have brought home a gentleman for supper."
+
+"Yassah, Misteh Ho'ace.  I was jest agwine to open up de blin's."
+
+He lifted the wire screens and flung back the shutters, beamed
+on the rector as he relieved him of his hat, and noiselessly retired.
+Curiosity, hitherto suppressed by more powerful feelings, awoke in Hodder
+speculations which ordinarily would have been aroused before: every
+object in the room bespoke gentility, was eloquent of a day when wealth
+was honoured and respected: photographs, daguerreotypes in old-fashioned
+frames bore evidence of friendships of the past, and over the marble
+mantel hung a portrait of a sweet-faced woman in the costume of the
+thirties, whose eyes reminded Hodder of Mr. Bentley's.  Who was she?
+
+Hodder wondered.  Presently he found himself before a photograph on the
+wall beyond, at which he had been staring unconsciously.
+
+"Ah, you recognize it," said Mr. Bentley.
+
+"St. John's!"
+
+"Yes," Mr. Bentley repeated, "St. John's."  He smiled at Hodder's glance
+of bewilderment, and put his hand on the younger man's arm.  "That
+picture was taken before you were born, sir, I venture to say--in 1869.
+I am very fond of it, for it gives the church in perspective, as you see.
+That was Mr. Gore's house"--he indicated a square, heavily corniced
+mansion--"where the hotel now stands, and that was his garden, next the
+church, where you see the trees above the wall."
+
+The rector turned again and looked at his host, who, was gazing at the
+picture thoughtfully.
+
+"I ought to have remembered," he said.  "I have seen your name in the
+church records, sir, and I have heard Mr. Waring speak of you."
+
+"My dear Mr. Hodder, there is no reason why you should have known me.
+A great many years have passed since I was a parishioner of St. John's
+--a great many years."
+
+"But it was you," the rector began, uncertainly, and suddenly spoke with
+conviction, "it was you who chose the architect, who did more than other
+men to make the church what it is."
+
+"Whatever I may have done," replied Mr. Bentley, with simple dignity,
+"has brought its reward.  To this day I have not ceased to derive
+pleasure from it, and often I go out of my way, through Burton Street,
+although the view is cramped.  And sometimes," he added, with the hint of
+a twinkle in his eye, "I go in.  This afternoon is not the first time I
+have seen you, Mr. Hodder."
+
+"But--?" said the rector.  He stared at the other's face, and the
+question died on his lips.
+
+"You wonder why I am no longer a parishioner.  The time came when
+I could not afford to be."  There was no hint of reproach in his voice,
+of bitterness.  He spoke regretfully, indeed, but as one stating an
+incontrovertible fact.  "I lost my fortune, I could not keep my pew,
+so I deeded it back to the church.  My old friends, Mrs. Dimock and Asa
+Waring, and others, too, were very kind.  But I could not accept their
+hospitality."
+
+Hodder bowed his head in silence.  What thundered indictment of the
+Church of Christ could have been as severe, as wholly condemning as these
+few words so dispassionately uttered by the man beside him?
+
+The old darky entered, and announced supper.
+
+Hodder had lost his way, yet a hand had been held out to him, and he
+seized it.  With a sense of being led, psychically as well as physically,
+he followed Mr. Bentley into a large bedroom, where a high, four-posted
+bed lifted a pleated canopy toward the ceiling.  And after he had washed
+his hands they entered a dining-room looking out upon a little yard in
+the rear, which had been transformed into a garden.  Roses, morning
+glories, and nasturtiums were growing against the walls; a hose lay
+coiled upon the path; the bricks, baked during the day, were splashed
+with water; the leaves and petals were wet, and the acrid odour of moist
+earth, mingling with perfumes, penetrated the room.  Hodder paused in the
+window.
+
+"Sam keeps our flowers alive," he heard Mr. Bentley say, "I don't know
+how."
+
+"I scrubs 'em, sah," said Sam.  "Yassah, I washes 'em like chilluns."
+
+He found himself, at Mr. Bentley's request, asking grace, the old darky
+with reverently bent head standing behind his master; sitting down at a
+mahogany table that reflected like a mirror the few pieces of old silver,
+to a supper of beaten biscuits that burned one's fingers, of 'broiled
+chicken and coffee, and sliced peaches and cream.  Mr. Bentley was
+talking of other days--not so long gone by when the great city had been a
+village, or scarcely more.  The furniture, it seemed, had come from his
+own house in what was called the Wilderness Road, not far from the river
+banks, over the site of which limited trains now rolled on their way
+eastward toward the northernmost of the city's bridges.  He mentioned
+many names, some remembered, some forgotten, like his own; dwelt on
+pleasures and customs gone by forever.
+
+"A little while after I moved in here, I found that one old man could not
+fill the whole of this house, so I let the upper floors," he explained,
+smilingly.  "Some day I must introduce you to my tenants, Mr. Hodder."
+
+By degrees, as Hodder listened, he became calm.  Like a child, he found
+himself distracted, talking, asking questions: and the intervals grew
+longer between the recurrent surges of fear when the memory rose before
+him of the events of the day,--of the woman, the child, and the man: of
+Eldon Parr and this deed he had done; hinting, as it did, of closed
+chambers of other deeds yet to be opened, of countless, hidden miseries
+still to be revealed: when he heard once more the tortured voice of the
+banker, and the question: "How would you like to live in this house--
+alone?  "In contrast, now he beheld the peace in the face of the man
+whose worldly goods Eldon Parr had taken, and whom he had driven out of
+the church.  Surely, this man had found a solution! .  .  .  What was it?
+
+Hodder thought of the child, of the verdict of Dr. Jarvis, but he
+lingered on, loth to leave,--if the truth be told--afraid to leave;
+drawing strength from his host's calm, wondering as to the source of it,
+as to the life which was its expression; longing, yet not presuming, to
+question.  The twilight deepened, and the old darky lit a lamp and led
+the way back to the library.
+
+"Sam," said Mr. Bentley, "draw up the armchair for Mr. Hodder beside the
+window.  It is cooler there."
+
+"I ought to go," Hodder said.  "I ought to see how the child is.  Jarvis
+will have been there by this time, and there may be necessaries--"
+
+"Jarvis will have attended to that," Mr. Bentley replied.  "Sit down, Mr.
+Hodder.  I am not sure that, for the present, we have not done all in
+this case that is humanly possible."
+
+"You mean," said the rector, "that they will accept nothing from me."
+It came from him, spontaneously, like a cry.  He had not meant to say it.
+"I don't blame them.  I don't blame them for losing their faith in God
+and man, in the Church.  I ought to have seen it before, but I was blind,
+incredibly blind--until it struck me in the face.  You saw it, sir, and
+you left a church from which the poor are thrust out, which refuses to
+heed the first precept of its Master."
+
+"I saw it," answered Mr. Bentley, "but I could do nothing.  Perhaps you
+can do--something."
+
+"Ah!" Hodder exclaimed sharply, "why do you say that?  The Church is
+paralyzed, chained.  How can she reach these wretched people who are the
+victims of the ruthless individualism and greed of those who control her?
+You know--that man, Mr. Bentley."  (Hodder could not bring himself to
+pronounce Eldon Parr's name.)  "I had an affection for him, I pitied him,
+because he suffers--"
+
+"Yes," echoed Mr. Bentley, "he suffers."
+
+Hodder was momentarily arrested by the sadness of his tone.
+
+"But he doesn't know why he suffers--he cannot be made to see," the
+rector went on.  "And he is making others suffer,--hideously, while he
+imagines himself a Christian.  He is the Church to that miserable,
+hopeless wretch we saw to-day, and to hundreds of the same kind whom he
+has driven to desperation.  And I--who am supposed to be the vicar of
+God--I am powerless.  They have a contempt for me, a just contempt.  They
+thrust me out of their doors, bid me to return and minister to their
+oppressors.  You were right to leave, and I should have left long since."
+
+He had not spoken with violence, or with a lack of control.  He seemed
+rather to have regained a mastery of himself, and felt as a man from whom
+the shackles have been struck, proclaiming his freedom.  Mr. Bentley's
+eyes lighted in involuntary response as he gazed at the figure and face
+before him.  He pressed his hands together.
+
+"If you will forgive a curiosity, Mr. Hodder, that is somewhat due to my
+interest in a church with which I have many precious associations, may I
+ask if this is a sudden determination on your part?"
+
+"No," Hodder said.  "I have known ever since I came here that something
+was wrong, but at first I couldn't see it, and after that I wouldn't see
+it.  That is about what happened, as I look back on it.
+
+"But the farther in I went," Hodder continued, "the more tangled and
+bewildered I became.  I was hypnotized, I think," he added with a
+gesture,--"hypnotized, as a man is who never takes his eyes from a
+pattern.  I wanted to get at this neighbourhood--Dalton Street--I mean,
+and finally I agreed to the establishment of a settlement house over
+here, to be paid for largely by Eldon Parr and Francis Ferguson.  I
+couldn't see the folly of such an undertaking--the supreme irony of it,
+until--until it was pointed out to me: He hesitated; the remembrance of
+Alison Parr ran through him, a thread of pain.  "And even then I tried to
+dodge the issue, I tried to make myself believe that good might flow out
+of evil; that the Church, which is supposed to be founded on the highest
+ideal ever presented to man, might compromise and be practical, that
+she might accept money which had been wrung from a trusting public by
+extortion, by thinly disguised thievery such as this Consolidated
+Tractions Company fraud, and do good with it!  And at last I made up
+my mind to go away, to-day, to a quiet place where I might be alone,
+and reflect, when by a singular circumstance I was brought into contact
+with this man, Garvin.  I see now, clearly enough, that if I had gone,
+I should never have come back."
+
+"And you still intend to go?" Mr. Bentley asked.
+
+Hodder leaned his elbow against the mantel.  The lamplight had a curious
+effect on Mr. Bentley's face.
+
+"What can I do?" he demanded.  The question was not aimed directly at his
+host--it was in the nature of a renewed appeal to a tribunal which had
+been mute, but with which he now seemed vaguely aware of a certain
+contact.  "Even supposing I could bring myself to accept the compromise--
+now that I see it clearly, that the end justifies the means--what good
+could I accomplish?  You saw what happened this afternoon--the man would
+have driven me out if, it hadn't been for you.  This whole conception of
+charity is a crime against civilization--I had to have that pointed out
+to me, too,--this system of legalized or semi-legalized robbery and the
+distribution of largesse to the victims.  The Church is doing wrong,
+is stultifying herself in encouraging it.  She should set her face
+rigidly against it, stand for morality and justice and Christianity in
+government, not for pauperizing.  It is her mission to enlighten these
+people, all people--to make them self-respecting, to give them some
+notion of the dignity of their souls and their rights before God and
+man."
+
+"Aren't you yourself suggesting," said Mr. Bentley, "the course which
+will permit you to remain?"
+
+Hodder was silent.  The thought struck him with tremendous force.  Had he
+suggested it?  And how--why?  Could it be done?  Could he do it or begin
+it?
+
+"We have met at last in a singular way," he heard Mr. Bentley going on,
+"in a way that has brushed aside the conventions, in a way--I am happy to
+say--that has enabled you to give me your confidence.  And I am an old
+man,--that has made it easier.  I saw this afternoon, Mr. Hodder, that
+you were troubled, although you tried to hide it."
+
+"I knew that you saw it," Hodder said.
+
+"Nor was it difficult for me to guess something of the cause of it.  The
+same thing has troubled me."
+
+"You?"
+
+"Yes," Mr. Bentley answered.  "I left St. John's, but the habits and
+affections of a lifetime are not easily severed.  And some time before
+I left it I began to have visions of a future for it.  There was a
+question, many years ago, as to whether a new St. John's should not be
+built in the West End, on a site convenient to the parishioners, and this
+removal I opposed.  Mr. Waring stood by me.  We foresaw the day when
+this district would be--what it is now--the precarious refuge of the
+unfortunate in the battle of life, of just such unhappy families as the
+Garvins, of miserable women who sell themselves to keep alive.  I thought
+of St. John's, as you did, as an oasis in a desert of misery and vice.
+At that time I, too, believed in the system of charities which you have
+so well characterized as pauperizing."
+
+"And now?"
+
+Mr. Bentley smiled, as at a reminiscence.
+
+"My eyes were opened," he replied, and in these simple words summed up
+and condemned it all.  "They are craving bread, and we fling them atones.
+I came here.  It was a house I owned, which I saved from the wrecks, and
+as I look back upon what the world would call a misfortune, sir, I can
+see that it was a propitious event, for me.  The street 'ran down,'
+as the saying goes.  I grew gradually to know these people, my new
+neighbours, largely through their children, and I perceived many things
+I had not dreamed of--before then.  I saw how the Church was hampered,
+fettered; I saw why they disliked and distrusted it."
+
+"And yet you still believed that it had a mission?"  Hodder interrupted.
+He had been listening with rapt attention.
+
+"I still believed it," said Mr. Bentley.  "My conception of that mission
+changed, grew, and yet it seemed further and further from fulfilment.
+And then you came to St. John's."
+
+"I!" The cry was involuntary.
+
+"You," Mr. Bentley repeated.  "Sometimes," he added whimsically, "I go
+there, as I have told you.  I saw you, I heard you preach.  I talked to
+my friend Waring about you.  I saw that your eyes were not opened, but I
+think I had a certain presentiment, for which I do not pretend to
+account, that they would be opened."
+
+"You mean," said the rector, "that if I believe in the mission of the
+Church as I have partially stated it here tonight, I--should stay and
+fight for it."
+
+"Precisely," Mr. Bentley replied.
+
+There was a note of enthusiasm, almost of militancy in the old
+gentleman's tone that surprised and agitated Hodder.  He took a turn
+up and down the room before he answered.
+
+"I ought to tell you that the view I expressed a moment ago is new to me.
+I had not thought of it before, and it is absolutely at variance with any
+previous ideas I have held.  I can see that it must involve, if carried
+to its logical conclusion, a change in the conception of Christianity I
+have hitherto held."
+
+He was too intent upon following up the thought to notice Mr. Bentley's
+expression of assent.
+
+"And suppose," he asked, "I were unable to come to any conclusion?
+I will be frank, Mr. Bentley, and confess to you that at present I cannot
+see my way.  You have heard me preach--you know what my beliefs have
+been.  They are shattered.  And, while I feel that there is some definite
+connection between the view of the Church which I mentioned and her
+message to the individual, I do not perceive it clearly.  I am not
+prepared at present to be the advocate of Christianity, because I do
+not know what Christianity is.  I thought I knew.
+
+"I shall have to begin all over again, as though I had never taken
+orders, submit to a thorough test, examine the evidence impartially.  It
+is the only way.  Of this much I am sure, that the Church as a whole has
+been engaged in a senseless conflict with science and progressive
+thought, that she has insisted upon the acceptance of facts which are in
+violation of reason and which have nothing to do with religion.  She has
+taught them to me--made them, in fact, a part of me.  I have clung to
+them as long as I can, and in throwing them over I don't know where I
+shall land."
+
+His voice was measured, his words chosen, yet they expressed a withering
+indignation and contempt which were plainly the culmination of months of
+bewilderment--now replaced by a clear-cut determination.
+
+"I do not blame any individual," he continued, "but the system by which
+clergymen are educated.
+
+"I intend to stay here, now, without conducting any services, and find
+out for myself what the conditions are here in Dalton Street.  You know
+those people, Mr. Bentley, you understand them, and I am going to ask you
+to help me.  You have evidently solved the problem."
+
+Mr. Bentley rose.  And he laid a hand, which was not quite steady, on the
+rector's shoulder.
+
+"Believe me, sir," he replied, "I appreciate something of what such a
+course must mean to you--a clergyman."  He paused, and a look came upon
+his face, a look that might scarce have been called a smile--Hodder
+remembered it as a glow--reminiscent of many things.  In it a life was
+summed ups in it understanding, beneficence, charity, sympathy, were all
+expressed, yet seemingly blended into one.  "I do not know what my
+testimony may be worth to you, my friend, but I give it freely.  I
+sometimes think I have been peculiarly fortunate.  But I have lived a
+great many years, and the older I get and the more I see of human nature
+the firmer has grown my conviction of its essential nobility and
+goodness."
+
+Hodder marvelled, and was silent.
+
+"You will come here, often,--every day if you can.  There are many men
+and women, friends of mine, whom I should like you to know, who would
+like to know you."
+
+"I will, and thank you," Hodder answered.  Words were inadequate for the
+occasion .  .  .  .
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE WOMAN OF THE SONG
+
+On leaving Mr. Bentley, Hodder went slowly down Dalton Street, wondering
+that mere contact with another human being should have given him the
+resolution to turn his face once again toward the house whither he was
+bound.  And this man had given him something more.  It might hardly have
+been called faith; a new courage to fare forth across the Unknown--that
+was it; hope, faint but revived.
+
+Presently he stopped on the sidewalk, looked around him, and read a sign
+in glaring, electric letters, Hotel Albert.  Despite the heat, the place
+was ablaze with lights.  Men and women were passing, pausing--going in.
+A motor, with a liveried chauffeur whom he remembered having seen before,
+was standing in front of the Rathskeller.  The nightly carousal was
+beginning.
+
+Hodder retraced his steps, crossed the street diagonally, came to the
+dilapidated gate he remembered so well, and looked up through the dusk at
+the house.  If death had entered it, there was no sign: death must be a
+frequent visitor hereabouts.  On the doorsteps he saw figures outlined,
+slatternly women and men in shirt-sleeves who rose in silence to make way
+for him, staring at him curiously.  He plunged into the hot darkness of
+the hall, groped his way up the stairs and through the passage, and
+hesitated.  A single gas jet burned low in the stagnant air, and after a
+moment he made out, by its dim light, a woman on her knees beside the
+couch, mechanically moving the tattered palm-leaf over the motionless
+little figure.  The child was still alive.  He drew a deep breath, and
+entered; at the sound of his step Mrs. Garvin suddenly started up.
+
+"Richard!" she cried, and then stood staring at the rector.  "Have you
+seen my husband, sir?  He went away soon after you left."
+
+Hodder, taken by surprise, replied that he had not.  Her tone, her
+gesture of anxiety he found vaguely disquieting.
+
+"The doctor has been here?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," she answered absently.  "I don't know where he can be--Richard.
+He didn't even wait to see the doctor.  And he thinks so much of Dicky,
+sir, he sits here of an evening--"
+
+Hodder sat down beside her, and taking the palm-leaf from her hand, began
+himself to fan the child.  Something of her misgiving had communicated
+itself to him.
+
+"Don't worry," he said.  "Remember that you have been through a great
+deal, and it is natural that you should be overwrought.  Your husband
+feels strongly.  I don't blame him.  And the sight of me this afternoon
+upset him.  He has gone out to walk."
+
+"Richard is proud," she answered simply.  "He used to say he'd rather
+die than take charity--and now he's come to it.  And it's--that man, sir,
+who's got on his brain, and changed him.  He wasn't always like this, but
+now he can't seem to think of anything else.  He wakes up in the night
+.  .  .  .  And he used to have such a sweet nature--you wouldn't have
+known him .  .  .  and came home so happy in the evenings in Alder
+Street, often with a little fruit, or something he'd bought for us, and
+romp with Dicky in the yard, and I'd stand and laugh at them.  Even after
+we'd lost our money, when he was sick that time, he didn't feel this way.
+It grew on him when he couldn't get work, and then he began to cut things
+out of the papers about Mr. Parr.  And I have sometimes thought that
+that's kept him from getting work.  He talks about it, and people don't
+know what to make of him.  They don't know how hard he'd try if they'd
+give him something.". . . .
+
+"We shall find something," said the rector, striving to throw into his
+voice confidence and calm.  He did not dare to look at her, but continued
+to move the fan.
+
+The child stirred a little.  Mrs. Garvin put out her hand.
+
+"Yes, the doctor was here.  He was very kind.  Oh, sir," she exclaimed,
+"I hope you won't think us ungrateful--and that Mr. Bentley won't.
+Dr. Jarvis has hopes, sir,--he says--I forget the name he called it, what
+Dicky has.  It's something uncommon.  He says it was--brought on by the
+heat, and want of food--good food.  And he's coming himself in the
+morning to take him out to that hospital beyond the park--in an
+automobile, sir.  I was just thinking what a pity it is Dicky wouldn't
+realize it. He's always wanted to ride in one."  Suddenly her tears
+flowed, unheeded, and she clung to the little hand convulsively.
+"I don't know what I shall do without him, Sir, I don't .  .  .  .  I've
+always had him .  .  .  and when he's sick, among strangers."  .  .  .
+
+The rector rose to the occasion.
+
+"Now, Mrs. Garvin," he said firmly, "you must remember that there is only
+one way to save the boy's life.  It will be easy to get you a room near
+the hospital, where you can see him constantly."
+
+"I know--I know, sir.  But I couldn't leave his father, I couldn't leave
+Richard."  She looked around distractedly.  "Where is he?"
+
+"He will come back presently," said the rector.  "If not, I will look for
+him."
+
+She did not reply, but continued to weep in silence.  Suddenly, above the
+confused noises of the night, the loud notes of a piano broke, and the
+woman whose voice he had heard in the afternoon began once more with
+appalling vigour to sing.  The child moaned.
+
+Mrs. Garvin started up hysterically.
+
+"I can't stand it--I can't stand her singing that now," she sobbed.
+
+Thirty feet away, across the yard, Hodder saw the gleaming window from
+which the music came.  He got to his feet.  Another verse began, with
+more of the brazen emphasis of the concert-hall singer than ever.
+He glanced at the woman beside him, irresolutely.
+
+"I'll speak to her," he said.
+
+Mrs. Garvin did not appear to hear him, but flung herself down beside the
+lounge.  As he seized his hat and left the room he had the idea of
+telephoning for a nurse, when he almost ran into some one in the upper
+hall, and recognized the stout German woman, Mrs. Breitmann.
+
+"Mrs. Garvin"--he said, "she ought not to be left--"
+
+"I am just now going," said Mrs. Breitmann.  "I stay with her until her
+husband come."
+
+Such was the confidence with which, for some reason, she inspired him,
+that he left with an easier mind.
+
+It was not until the rector had arrived at the vestibule of the apartment
+house next door that something--of the difficulty and delicacy of the
+errand he had undertaken came home to him.  Impulse had brought him thus
+far, but now he stood staring helplessly at a row of bells, speaking
+tubes, and cards.  Which, for example, belonged to the lady whose soprano
+voice pervaded the neighbourhood?  He looked up and down the street, in
+the vain hope of finding a messenger.  The song continued: he had
+promised to stop it.  Hodder accused himself of cowardice.
+
+To his horror, Hodder felt stealing over him, incredible though it seemed
+after the depths through which he had passed, a faint sense of
+fascination in the adventure.  It was this that appalled him--this
+tenacity of the flesh,--which no terrors seemed adequate to drive out.
+The sensation, faint as it was, unmanned him.  There were still many
+unexplored corners in his soul.
+
+He turned, once more contemplated the bells, and it was not until
+then he noticed that the door was ajar.  He pushed it open, climbed the
+staircase, and stood in the doorway of what might be called a sitting
+room, his eyes fixed on a swaying back before an upright piano against
+the wall; his heart seemed to throb with the boisterous beat of the
+music.  The woman's hair, in two long and heavy plaits falling below her
+waist, suddenly fascinated him.  It was of the rarest of russet reds.
+She came abruptly to the end of the song.
+
+"I beg your pardon--" he began.
+
+She swung about with a start, her music dropping to the floor, and stared
+at him.  Her tattered blue kimono fell away at her elbows, her full
+throat was bare, and a slipper she had kicked off lay on the floor beside
+her.  He recoiled a little, breathing deeply.  She stared at him.
+
+"My God, how you scared me!" she exclaimed.  Evidently a second glance
+brought to her a realization of his clerical costume.  "Say, how did you
+get in here?"
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said again, "but there is a very sick child in
+the house next door and I came to ask you if you would mind not playing
+any more to-night."
+
+She did not reply at once, and her expression he found unsolvable.  Much
+of it might be traced to a life which had contracted the habit of taking
+nothing on trust, a life which betrayed itself in unmistakable traces
+about the eyes.  And Hodder perceived that the face, if the stamp of this
+expression could have been removed, was not unpleasing, although
+indulgence and recklessness were beginning to remould it.
+
+"Quit stringin' me," she said.
+
+For a moment he was at a loss.  He gathered that she did not believe him,
+and crossed to the open window.
+
+"If you will come here," he said, "I will show you the room where he
+lies.  We hope to be able to take him to the hospital to-morrow."  He
+paused a moment, and added: "He enjoyed your music very much when he was
+better."
+
+The comment proved a touchstone.
+
+"Say," she remarked, with a smile that revealed a set of surprisingly
+good teeth, "I can make the box talk when I get a-goin'.  There's no
+stopping me this side of grand opera,--that's no fable.  I'm not so bad
+for an enginoo, am I?"
+
+Thus directly appealed to, in common courtesy he assented.
+
+"No indeed," he said.
+
+That's right," she declared.  "But the managers won't have it at any
+price.  Those jays don't know anything, do they?  They've only got a
+dream of what the public wants.  You wouldn't believe it, but I've sung
+for 'em, and they threw me out.  You wouldn't believe it, would you?"
+
+"I must own," said the rector, "that I have never had any experience with
+managers."
+
+She sat still considering him from the piano stool, her knees apart, her
+hands folded in her lap.  Mockery came into her eyes.
+
+"Say, what did you come in here for, honest injun?" she demanded.
+
+He was aware of trying to speak sternly, and of failing.  To save his
+life he could not, then, bring up before himself the scene in the little
+back room across the yard in its full terror and reality, reproduce his
+own feelings of only a few minutes ago which had impelled him hither.
+A month, a year might have elapsed.  Every faculty was now centred on
+the woman in front of him, and on her life.
+
+"Why do you doubt me?"  he asked.
+
+She continued to contemplate him.  Her eyes were strange, baffling,
+smouldering, yellow-brown, shifting, yet not shifty: eyes with a history.
+Her laugh proclaimed both effrontery and uneasiness.
+
+"Don't get huffy," she said.  "The kid's sick--that's on the level, is
+it?  You didn't come 'round to see me?"  The insinuation was in her voice
+as well as in her words.  He did not resent it, but felt an odd thrill of
+commingled pity and--fear.
+
+"I came for the reason I have given you," he replied; and added, more
+gently: "I know it is a good deal to ask, but you will be doing a great
+kindness.  The mother is distracted.  The child, as I told you, will be
+taken to the hospital in the morning."
+
+She reached out a hand and closed the piano softly.
+
+"I guess I can hold off for to-night," she said.  "Sometimes things get
+kind of dull--you know, when there's nothing doing, and this keeps me
+lively.  How old is the kid?"
+
+"About nine," he estimated.
+
+"Say, I'm sorry."  She spoke with a genuineness of feeling that surprised
+him.  He went slowly, almost apologetically toward the door.
+
+"Good night," he said, "and thank you."
+
+Her look halted him.
+
+"What's your hurry?"  she demanded.
+
+"I'm sorry," he said hastily, "but I must be going."  He was, in truth,
+in a panic to leave.
+
+"You're a minister, ain't you?"
+
+"Yes," he said.
+
+"I guess you don't think much of me, do you?" she demanded.
+
+He halted abruptly, struck by the challenge, and he saw that this woman
+had spoken not for herself, but for an entire outlawed and desperate
+class.  The fact that the words were mocking and brazen made no
+difference; it would have been odd had they not been so.  With a shock
+of surprise he suddenly remembered that his inability to reach this
+class had been one of the causes of his despair!  And now?  With the
+realization, reaction set in, an overpowering feeling of weariness, a
+desire--for rest--for sleep.  The electric light beside the piano danced
+before his eyes, yet he heard within him a voice crying out to him to
+stay.  Desperately tired though he was, he must not leave now.  He walked
+slowly to the table, put his hat on it and sat down in a chair beside it.
+
+Why do you say that?"  he asked.
+
+"Oh, cut it out!" said the woman.  "I'm on to you church folks."  She
+laughed.  "One of 'em came in here once, and wanted to pray.  I made a
+monkey of him."
+
+"I hope," said the rector, smiling a little, "that is not the reason why
+you wish me to stay."
+
+She regarded him doubtfully.
+
+"You're not the same sort," she announced at length.
+
+"What sort was he?"
+
+"He was easy,--old enough to know better--most of the easy ones are.  He
+marched in sanctimonious as you please, with his mouth full of salvation
+and Bible verses."  She laughed again at the recollection.
+
+"And after that," said the rector, "you felt that ministers were a lot of
+hypocrites."
+
+"I never had much opinion of 'em," she admitted, "nor of church people,
+either," she added, with emphasis.
+
+"There's Ferguson, who has the department store,--he's 'way up' in church
+circles.  I saw him a couple of months ago, one Sunday morning, driving
+to that church on Burton Street, where all the rich folks go.  I forget
+the name--"
+
+"St. John's," he supplied.  He had got beyond surprise.
+
+"St. John's--that's it.  They tell me he gives a lot of money to it--
+money that he steals from the girls he hires.  Oh, yes, he'll get to
+heaven--I don't think."
+
+"How do you mean that he steals money from the girls?"
+
+"Say, you are innocent--ain't you!  Did you ever go down to that store?
+Do you know what a floorwalker is?  Did you ever see the cheap guys
+hanging around, and the young swells waiting to get a chance at the girls
+behind the counters?  Why do you suppose so many of 'em take to the easy
+life?  I'll put you next--because Ferguson don't pay 'em enough to live
+on.  That's why.  He makes 'em sign a paper, when he hires 'em, that they
+live at home, that they've got some place to eat and sleep, and they sign
+it all right.  That's to square up Ferguson's conscience.  But say, if
+you think a girl can support herself in this city and dress on what he
+pays, you've got another guess comin'."
+
+There rose up before him, unsummoned, the image of Nan Ferguson, in all
+her freshness and innocence, as she had stood beside him on the porch in
+Park Street.  He was somewhat astonished to find himself defending his
+parishioner.
+
+"May it not be true, in order to compete with other department stores,
+that Mr. Ferguson has to pay the same wages?" he said.
+
+"Forget it.  I guess you know what Galt House is?  That's where women
+like me can go when we get all played out and there's nothing left in the
+game--it's on River Street.  Maybe you've been there."
+
+Hodder nodded.
+
+"Well," she continued, "Ferguson pays a lot of money to keep that going,
+and gets his name in the papers.  He hands over to the hospitals where
+some of us die--and it's all advertised.  He forks out to the church.
+Now, I put it to you, why don't he sink some of that money where it
+belongs--in living wages?  Because there's nothing in it for him--
+that's why."
+
+The rector looked at her in silence.  He had not suspected her of so much
+intellect.  He glanced about the apartment, at the cheap portiere flung
+over the sofa; at the gaudy sofa cushions, two of which bore the names
+and colours of certain colleges.  The gas log was almost hidden by dried
+palm leaves, a cigarette stump lay on the fender; on the mantel above
+were several photographs of men and at the other side an open door
+revealed a bedroom.
+
+"This is a nice place, ain't it?" she observed.  "I furnished it when I
+was on velvet--nothing was too good for me.  Money's like champagne when
+you take the cork out, it won't keep.  I was rich once.  It was lively
+while it lasted," she added, with a sigh: "I've struck the down trail.
+I oughtn't, by rights, to be here fooling with you.  There's nothing in
+it."  She glanced at the clock.  "I ought to get busy."
+
+As the realization of her meaning came to him, he quivered.
+
+"Is there no way but that?" he asked, in a low voice.
+
+"Say, you're not a-goin' to preach, are you?"
+
+"No," he answered, "God forbid!  I was not asking the question of you."
+
+She stared at him.
+
+"Of who, then?"
+
+He was silent.
+
+"You've left me at the station.  But on the level, you don't seem to know
+much, that's a fact.  You don't think the man who owns these flats is in
+it for charity, do you?  'Single ladies,' like me, have to give up.  And
+then there are other little grafts that wouldn't interest you.  What
+church do you come from anyway?"
+
+"You mentioned it a little while ago."
+
+"St. John's!"  She leaned back against the piano and laughed
+unrestrainedly.  "That's a good one, to think how straight I've been
+talking to you."
+
+"I'm much obliged to you," he said.
+
+Again she gazed at him, now plainly perplexed.
+
+"What are you giving me?"
+
+"I mean what I say," he answered.  "I am obliged to you for telling me
+things I didn't know.  And I appreciate--your asking me to stay."
+
+She was sitting upright now, her expression changed, her breath came more
+rapidly, her lips parted as she gazed at him.
+
+"Do you know," she said, "I haven't had anybody speak to me like that
+for four years."  Her voice betrayed excitement, and differed in tone,
+and she had cast off unconsciously the vulgarity of speech.  At that
+moment she seemed reminiscent of what she must once have been; and he
+found himself going through an effort at reconstruction.
+
+"Like what?"  he asked.
+
+"Like a woman," she answered vehemently.
+
+"My name is John Hodder," he said, "and I live in the parish house, next
+door to the church.  I should like to be your friend, if you will let me.
+If I can be of any help to you now, or at any other time, I shall feel
+happy.  I promise not to preach," he added.
+
+She got up abruptly, and went to the window.  And when she turned to him
+again, it was with something of the old bravado.
+
+"You'd better leave me alone, I'm no good;" she said.  "I'm much obliged
+to you, but I don't want any charity or probation houses in mine.  And
+honest work's a thing of the past for me--even if I could get a job.
+Nobody would have me.  But if they would, I couldn't work any more.
+I've got out of the hang of it."  With a swift and decisive movement she
+crossed the room, opened a cabinet on the wall, revealing a bottle and
+glasses.
+
+"So you're bent upon going--downhill?" he said.
+
+"What can you do to stop it?"  she retorted defiantly, "Give me religion
+---I guess you'd tell me.  Religion's all right for those on top, but
+say, it would be a joke if I got it.  There ain't any danger.  But if I
+did, it wouldn't pay room-rent and board."
+
+He sat mute.  Once more the truth overwhelmed, the folly of his former
+optimism arose to mock him.  What he beheld now, in its true aspect, was
+a disease of that civilization he had championed.  .  .
+
+She took the bottle from the cupboard and laid it on the table.
+
+"What's the difference?" she demanded.  "It's all over in a little while,
+anyway.  I guess you'd tell me there was a hell.  But if that's so, some
+of your church folks'll broil, too.  I'll take my chance on it, if they
+will."  She looked at him, half in defiance, half in friendliness, across
+the table.  "Say, you mean all right, but you're only wastin' time here.
+You can't do me any good, I tell you, and I've got to get busy."
+
+"May we not at least remain friends?" he asked, after a moment.
+
+Her laugh was a little harsh.
+
+"What kind of friendship would that be?  You, a minister, and me a woman
+on the town?"
+
+"If I can stand it, I should think you might."
+
+"Well, I can't stand it," she answered.
+
+He got up, and held out his hand.  She stood seemingly irresolute, and
+then took it.
+
+"Good night," he said.
+
+"Good night," she repeated nonchalantly.
+
+As he went out of the door she called after him:
+
+"Don't be afraid I'll worry the kid!"
+
+The stale odour of cigarette smoke with which the dim corridor was
+charged intoxicated, threatened to overpower him.  It seemed to be the
+reek of evil itself.  A closing door had a sinister meaning.  He hurried;
+obscurity reigned below, the light in the lower hall being out; fumbled
+for the door-knob, and once in the street took a deep breath and mopped
+his brow; but he had not proceeded half a block before he hesitated,
+retraced his steps, reentered the vestibule, and stooped to peer at the
+cards under the speaking tubes.  Cheaply printed in large script, was the
+name of the tenant of the second floor rear,--MISS KATE MARCY. . . .
+
+In crossing Tower Street he was frightened by the sharp clanging of a
+great electric car that roared past him, aflame with light.  His brain
+had seemingly ceased to work, and he stumbled at the curb, for he was
+very tired.  The events of the day no longer differentiated themselves
+in his mind but lay, a composite weight, upon his heart.  At length he
+reached the silent parish house, climbed the stairs and searched in his
+pocket for the key of his rooms.  The lock yielded, but while feeling for
+the switch he tripped and almost fell over an obstruction on the floor.
+
+The flooding light revealed his travelling-bags, as he had piled them,
+packed and ready to go to the station.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+
+Acceptance of authority is not faith, it is mere credulity
+Deification of beauty to the exclusion of all else
+Economic slavery
+Elaborate attention little men are apt to bestow upon women
+I hate humility
+I see no one upon whom I can rely but myself
+If Christians were logical, they should be Socialists
+Immortality as orthodox Christianity depicts it
+Impulse had brought him thus far
+Indiscriminate, unreasoning self-sacrifice
+Religion, I think, should be everybody's (profession)
+Seeking a forgiveness out of all proportion to the trespass
+St Paul, you say, put us in our proper place
+The hours of greatest suffering are the empty hours
+Thinking isn't--believing
+We must believe, if we believe at all, without authority
+When our brief span of usefulness is done
+Whole conception of charity is a crime against civilization
+You and your religion are as far apart as the poles
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INSIDE OF THE CUP, V3, BY CHURCHILL ***
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+************ This file should be named wc21w10.txt or wc21w10.zip ************
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