And Nelson Langmaid, who had fallen into the habit of dropping into Hodder"s rooms in the parish house on his way uptown for a chat about books, had been struck by the rector"s friendship with the banker.
"I don"t understand how you managed it, Hodder, in such a short time,"
he declared. "Mr. Parr"s a difficult man. In all these years, I"ve been closer to him than any one else, and I don"t know him today half as well as you do."
"I didn"t manage it," said Hodder, briefly.
"Well," replied the lawyer, quizzically, "you needn"t eat me up. I"m sure you didn"t do it on purpose. If you had,--to use a Hibernian phrase,--you never would have done it. I"ve seen it tried before. To tell you the truth, after I"d come back from Bremerton, that was the one thing I was afraid of--that you mightn"t get along with him."
Hodder himself was at a loss to account for the relationship. It troubled him vaguely, for Mr. Parr was the aggressor; and often at dusk, when Hodder was working under his study lamp, the telephone would ring, and on taking down the receiver he would hear the banker"s voice. "I"m alone to-night, Mr. Hodder. Will you come and have dinner with me?"
Had he known it, this was a different method of communication than that which the financier usually employed, one which should have flattered him. If Wallis Plimpton, for instance, had received such a personal message, the fact would not have remained unknown the next day at his club. Sometimes it was impossible for Hodder to go, and he said so; but he always went when he could.
The unwonted note of appeal (which the telephone seemed somehow to enhance) in Mr. Parr"s voice, never failed to find a response in the rector"s heart, and he would ponder over it as he walked across to Tower Street to take the electric car for the six-mile trip westward.
This note of appeal he inevitably contrasted with the dry, matter-of-fact reserve of his greeting at the great house, which loomed all the greater in the darkness. Unsatisfactory, from many points of view, as these evenings were, they served to keep whetted Hodder"s curiosity as to the life of this extraordinary man. All of its vaster significance for the world, its tremendous machinery, was out of his sight.
Mr. Parr seemed indeed to regard the rest of his fellow-creatures with the suspicion at which Langmaid had hinted, to look askance at the amenities people tentatively held out to him. And the private watchman whom Hodder sometimes met in the darkness, and who invariably scrutinized pedestrians on Park Street, seemed symbolic, of this att.i.tude. On rare occasions, when in town, the financier dined out, limiting himself to a few houses.
Once in a long while he attended what are known as banquets, such as those given by the Chamber of Commerce, though he generally refused to speak. Hodder, through Mr. Parr"s intervention, had gone to one of these, ably and breezily presided over by the versatile Mr. Plimpton.
Hodder felt not only curiosity and sympathy, but a vexing sense of the fruitlessness of his visits to Park Street. Mr. Parr seemed to like to have him there. And the very fact that the conversation rarely took any vital turn oddly contributed to the increasing permanence of the lien.
To venture on any topic relating to the affairs of the day were merely to summon forth the banker"s dogmatism, and Hodder"s own opinions on such matters were now in a strange and unsettled state. Mr. Parr liked best to talk of his treasures, and of the circ.u.mstances during his trips abroad that had led to their acquirement. Once the banker had asked him about parish house matters.
"I"m told you"re working very hard--stirring up McCrae. He needs it."
"I"m only trying to study the situation," Hodder replied. "I don"t think you quite do justice to McCrae," he added; "he"s very faithful, and seems to understand those people thoroughly."
Mr. Parr smiled.
"And what conclusions have you come to? If you think the system should be enlarged and reorganized I am willing at any time to go over it with you, with a view to making an additional contribution. Personally, while I have sympathy for the unfortunate, I"m not at all sure that much of the energy and money put into the inst.i.tutional work of churches isn"t wasted."
"I haven"t come to any conclusions--yet," said the rector, with a touch of sadness. "Perhaps I demand too much--expect too much."
The financier, deep in his leather chair under the shaded light, the tips of his fingers pressed together, regarded the younger man thoughtfully, but the smile lingered in his eyes.
"I told you you would meet problems," he said.
II
Hodder"s cosmos might have been compared, indeed, to that set forth in the Ptolemaic theory of the ancients. Like a cleverly carved Chinese object of ivory in the banker"s collection, it was a system of spheres, touching, concentric, yet separate. In an outer s.p.a.ce swung Mr. Parr; then came the scarcely less rarefied atmosphere of the Constables and Atterburys, Fergusons, Plimptons, Langmaids, Prestons, Larrabbees, Greys, and Gores, and then a smaller sphere which claims but a pa.s.sing mention. There were, in the congregation of St. John"s, a few people of moderate means whose houses or apartments the rector visited; people to whom modern life was increasingly perplexing.
In these ranks were certain maiden ladies and widows who found in church work an outlet to an otherwise circ.u.mscribed existence. Hodder met them continually in his daily rounds. There were people like the Bradleys, who rented half a pew and never missed a Sunday; Mr. Bradley, an elderly man whose children had scattered, was an upper clerk in one of Mr.
Parr"s trust companies: there were bachelors and young women, married or single, who taught in the Sunday school or helped with the night cla.s.ses. For the most part, all of these mentioned above belonged to an element that once had had a comfortable and well-recognized place in the community, yet had somehow been displaced. Many of them were connected by blood with more fortunate parishioners, but economic pressure had scattered them throughout new neighbourhoods and suburbs. Tradition still bound them to St. John"s.
With no fixed orbit, the rector cut at random through all of these strata, and into a fourth. Not very far into it, for this apparently went down to limitless depths, the very contemplation of which made him dizzy. The parish house seemed to float precariously on its surface.
Owing partly to the old-fashioned ideas of Dr. Gilman, and partly to the conservatism of its vestry, the inst.i.tutionalism of St. John"s was by no means up to date. No settlement house, with day nurseries, was maintained in the slums. The parish house, built in the early nineties, had its gymnasium hall and cla.s.s and reading rooms, but was not what in these rapidly moving times would be called modern. Presiding over its activities, and seconded by a pale, but earnest young man recently ordained, was Hodder"s first a.s.sistant, the Reverend Mr. McCrae.
McCrae was another puzzle. He was fifty and gaunt, with a wide flat forehead and thinning, grey hair, and wore steel spectacles. He had a numerous family. His speech, of which he was sparing, bore strong traces of a Caledonian accent. And this, with the addition of the fact that he was painstaking and methodical in his duties, and that his sermons were orthodox in the sense that they were extremely non-committal, was all that Hodder knew about him for many months. He never doubted, however, the man"s sincerity and loyalty.
But McCrae had a peculiar effect on him, and as time went on, his conviction deepened that his a.s.sistant was watching him. The fact that this tacit criticism did not seem unkindly did not greatly alleviate the impatience that he felt from time to time. He had formed a higher estimate of McCrae"s abilities than that generally prevailing throughout the parish; and in spite of, perhaps because of his att.i.tude, was drawn toward the man. This att.i.tude, as Hodder a.n.a.lyzed it from the expressions he occasionally surprised on his a.s.sistant"s face, was one of tolerance and experience, contemplating, with a faint amus.e.m.e.nt and a certain regret, the wasteful expenditure of youthful vitality. Yet it involved more. McCrae looked as if he knew--knew many things that he deemed it necessary for the new rector to find out by experience.
But he was a difficult man to talk to.
If the truth be told, the more Hodder became absorbed in these activities of the parish house, the greater grew his perplexity, the more acute his feeling of incompleteness; or rather, his sense that the principle was somehow fundamentally at fault. Out of the waters of the proletariat they fished, a.s.siduously and benignly, but at random, strange specimens! brought them, as it were, blinking to the light, and held them by sheer struggling. And sometimes, when they slipped away, dived after them. The young curate, Mr. Tompkinson, for the most part did the diving; or, in scriptural language, the searching after the lost sheep.
The results accomplished seemed indeed, as Mr. Parr had remarked, strangely disproportionate to the efforts, for they laboured abundantly.
The Italian mothers appeared stolidly appreciative of the altruism of Miss Ramsay, who taught the kindergarten, in taking their charges off their hands for three hours of a morning, and the same might be said of the Jews and Germans and Russians. The newsboys enjoyed the gymnasium and reading-rooms: some of them were drafted into the choir, yet the singing of Te Deums failed somehow to accomplish the miracle of regeneration. The boys, as a rule, were happier, no doubt; the new environments not wholly without results. But the rector was an idealist.
He strove hard to become their friend, and that of the men; to win their confidence, and with a considerable measure of success. On more than one occasion he threw aside his clerical coat and put on boxing-gloves, and he gave a series of lectures, with lantern slides, collected during the six months he had once spent in Europe. The Irish-Americans and the Germans were the readiest to respond, and these were for the most part young workingmen and youths by no means dest.i.tute. When they were out of a place, he would often run across them in the reading-room or sitting among the lockers beside the gymnasium, and they would rise and talk to him cordially and even familiarly about their affairs. They liked and trusted him--on a tacit condition. There was a boundary he might not cross. And the existence of that boundary did not seem to trouble McCrae.
One night as he stood with his a.s.sistant in the hall after the men had gone, Hodder could contain himself no longer.
"Look here, McCrae," he broke out, "these men never come to church--or only a very few of them."
"No more they do," McCrae agreed.
"Why don"t they?"
"Ye"ve asked them, perhaps."
"I"ve spoken to one or two of them," admitted the rector.
"And what do they tell you?"
Hodder smiled.
"They don"t tell me anything. They dodge."
"Precisely," said McCrae.
"We"re not making Christians of them," said Hodder, beginning to walk up and down. "Why is it?"
"It"s a big question."
"It is a big question. It"s the question of all questions, it seems to me. The function of the Church, in my opinion, is to make Christians."
"Try to teach them religion," said McCrae--he almost p.r.o.nounced it releegion--"and see what happens. Ye"ll have no cla.s.ses at all. They only come, the best of them, because ye let them alone that way, and they get a little decency and society help. It"s somewhat to keep them out of the dance-halls and saloons maybe."
"It"s not enough," the rector a.s.serted. "You"ve had a great deal of experience with them. And I want to know why, in your view, more of them don"t come into the Church."
"Would ye put Jimmy Flanagan and Otto Bauer and Tony Balda.s.saro in Mr.
Parr"s pew?" McCrae inquired, with a slight flavour of irony that was not ill-natured. "Or perhaps Mrs. Larrabbee would make room for them?"
"I"ve considered that, of course," replied Hodder, thoughtfully, though he was a little surprised that McCrae should have mentioned it. "You think their reasons are social, then,--that they feel the gap. I feel it myself most strongly. And yet none of these men are Socialists. If they were, they wouldn"t come here to the parish house."
"They"re not Socialists," agreed McCrae.