"The engine has lost its governor?"
"Exactly!" cried Mrs. Larrabbee. "What a clever simile!"
"It is Mr. Pares," said Hodder. "Only he was speaking of other symptoms, Socialism, and its opposite, individualism,--not carnivalism."
"Poor man," said Mrs. Larrabbee, accepting the new ground as safer, yet with a baffled feeling that Hodder had evaded her once more, "he has had his share of individualism and carnivalism. His son Preston was here last month, and was taken out to the yacht every night in an unspeakable state. And Alison hasn"t been what might be called a blessing."
"She must be unusual," said the rector, musingly.
"Oh, Alison is a Person. She has become quite the fashion, and has more work than she can possibly attend to. Very few women with her good looks could have done what she has without severe criticism, and something worse, perhaps. The most extraordinary thing about her is her contempt for what her father has gained, and for conventionalities. It always amuses me when I think that she might have been the wife of Gordon Atterbury. The G.o.ddess of Liberty linked to--what?"
Hodder thought instinctively of the Church. But he remained silent.
"As a rule, men are such fools about the women they wish to marry," she continued. "She would have led him a dance for a year or two, and then calmly and inexorably left him. And there was her father, with all his ability and genius, couldn"t see it either, but fondly imagined that Alison as Gordon Atterbury"s wife, would magically become an Atterbury and a bourgeoise, see that the corners were dusted in the big house, sew underwear for the poor, and fast in Lent."
"And she is happy--where she is?" he inquired somewhat naively.
"She is self-sufficient," said Mrs. Larrabbee, with unusual feeling, "and that is just what most women are not, in these days. Oh, why has life become such a problem? Sometimes I think, with all that I have, I"m not, so well off as one of those salesgirls in Ferguson"s, at home. I"m always searching for things to do--nothing is thrust on me. There are the charities--Galt House, and all that, but I never seem to get at anything, at the people I"d like to help. It"s like sending money to China. There is no direct touch any more. It"s like seeing one"s opportunities through an iron grating."
Hodder started at the phrase, so exactly had she expressed his own case.
"Ah," he said, "the iron grating bars the path of the Church, too."
And just what was the iron grating?
They had many moments of intimacy during that fort night, though none in which the plumb of their conversation descended to such a depth. For he was, as she had said, always "putting her off." Was it because he couldn"t satisfy her craving? give her the solution for which--he began to see--she thirsted? Why didn"t that religion that she seemed outwardly to profess and accept without qualification--the religion he taught set her at rest? show her the path?
Down in his heart he knew that he feared to ask.
That Mrs. Larrabbee was still another revelation, that she was not at rest, was gradually revealed to him as the days pa.s.sed. Her spirit, too, like his own, like "Mrs Constable"s, like Eldon Parr"s, like Eleanor Goodrich"s, was divided against itself; and this phenomenon in Mrs.
Larrabbee was perhaps a greater shock to him, since he had always regarded her as essentially in equilibrium. One of his reasons, indeed,--in addition to the friendship that had grown up between them,--for coming to visit her had been to gain the effect of her poise on his own. Poise in a modern woman, leading a modern life. It was thus she attracted him. It was not that he ignored her frivolous side; it was nicely balanced by the other, and that other seemed growing. The social, she accepted at what appeared to be its own worth. Unlike Mrs. Plimpton, for instance, she was so innately a lady that she had met with no resistance in the Eastern watering places, and her sense of values had remained the truer for it.
He did not admire her the less now he had discovered that the poise was not so adjusted as he had thought it, but his feeling about her changed, grew more personal, more complicated. She was showing an alarming tendency to lean on him at a time when he was examining with some concern his own supports. She possessed intelligence and fascination, she was a woman whose attentions would have flattered and disturbed any man with a spark of virility, and Hodder had constantly before his eyes the spectacle of others paying her court. Here were danger-signals again!
Mrs. Plaice, a middle-aged English lady staying in the house, never appeared until noon. Breakfast was set out in the tiled and sheltered loggia, where they were fanned by the cool airs of a softly breathing ocean. The world, on these mornings, had a sparkling unreality, the cold, cobalt sea stretching to sun-lit isles, and beyond, the vividly painted sh.o.r.e,--the setting of luxury had never been so complete. And the woman who sat opposite him seemed, like one of her own nectarines, to be the fruit that crowned it all.
Why not yield to the enchantment? Why rebel, when n.o.body else complained? Were it not more simple to accept what life sent in its orderly course instead of striving for an impossible and shadowy ideal?
Very shadowy indeed! And to what end were his labours in that smoky, western city, with its heedless Dalton Streets, which went their inevitable ways? For he had the choice.
To do him justice, he was slow in arriving at a realization that seemed to him so incredible, so preposterous. He was her rector! And he had accepted, all unconsciously, the worldly point of view as to Mrs.
Larrabbee,--that she was reserved for a worldly match. A clergyman"s wife! What would become of the clergyman? And yet other clergymen had married rich women, despite the warning of the needle"s eye.
She drove him in her buckboard to Jordan"s Pond, set, like a jewel in the hills, and even to the deep, cliff bordered inlet beyond North East, which reminded her, she said, of a Norway fiord. And sometimes they walked together through wooded paths that led them to beetling sh.o.r.es, and sat listening to the waves crashing far below. Silences and commonplaces became the rule instead of the eager discussions with which they had begun,--on such safer topics as the problem of the social work of modern churches. Her aromatic presence, and in this setting, continually disturbed him: nature"s perfumes, more definable,--exhalations of the sea and spruce,--mingled with hers, anaesthetics compelling lethargy. He felt himself drowning, even wished to drown,--and yet strangely resisted.
"I must go to-morrow," he said.
"To-morrow--why? There is a dinner, you know, and Mrs. Waterman wished so particularly to meet you."
He did not look at her. The undisguised note of pain found an echo within him. And this was Mrs. Larrabbee!
"I am sorry, but I must," he told her, and she may not have suspected the extent to which the firmness was feigned.
"You have promised to make other visits? The Fergusons,--they said they expected you."
"I"m going west--home," he said, and the word sounded odd.
"At this season! But there is n.o.body in church, at least only a few, and Mr. McCrae can take care of those--he always does. He likes it."
Hodder smiled in spite of himself. He might have told her that those outside the church were troubling him. But he did not, since he had small confidence in being able to bring them in.
"I have been away too long, I am getting spoiled," he replied, with an attempt at lightness. He forced his eyes to meet hers, and she read in them an unalterable resolution.
"It is my opinion you are too conscientious, even for a clergyman," she said, and now it was her lightness that hurt. She protested no more.
And as she led the way homeward through the narrow forest path, her head erect, still maintaining this lighter tone, he wondered how deeply she had read him; how far her intuition had carried her below the surface; whether she guessed the presence of that stifled thing in him which was crying feebly for life; whether it was that she had discovered, or something else? He must give it the chance it craved. He must get away--he must think. To surrender now would mean destruction...
Early the next morning, as he left the pier in the motor boat, he saw a pink scarf waving high above him from the loggia. And he flung up his hand in return. Mingled with a faint sense of freedom was intense sadness.
CHAPTER VIII. THE LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE
From the vantage point of his rooms in the parish house, Hodder reviewed the situation. And despite the desires thronging after him in his flight he had the feeling of once who, in the dark, has been very near to annihilation. What had shaken him most was the revelation of an old enemy which, watching its chance, had beset him at the first opportunity; and at a time when the scheme of life, which he flattered himself to have solved forever, was threatening once more to resolve itself into fragments. He had, as if by a miracle, escaped destruction in some insidious form.
He shrank instinctively from an a.n.a.lysis of the woman in regard to whom his feelings were, so complicated, and yet by no means lacking in tenderness. But as time went on, he recognized more and more that she had come into his life at a moment when he was peculiarly vulnerable.
She had taken him off his guard. That the brilliant Mrs. Larrabbee should have desired him--or what she believed was him--was food enough for thought, was an indication of an idealism in her nature that he would not have suspected. From a worldly point of view, the marriage would have commended itself to none of her friends. Yet Hodder perceived clearly that he could not have given her what she desired, since the marriage would have killed it in him. She offered him the other thing.
Once again he had managed somehow to cling to his dream of what the relationship between man and woman should be, and he saw more and more distinctly that he had coveted not only the jewel, but its setting. He could not see her out of it--she faded. Nor could he see himself in it.
Luxury,--of course,--that was what he had spurned. Luxury in contrast to Dalton Street, to the whirring factories near the church which discharged, at nightfall, their quotas of wan women and stunted children. And yet here he was catering to luxury, providing religion for it! Religion!
Early in November he heard that Mrs. Larrabbee had suddenly decided to go abroad without returning home....
That winter Hodder might have been likened to a Niagara for energy; an unharnessed Niagara--such would have been his own comment. He seemed to turn no wheels, or only a few at least, and feebly. And while the spectacle of their rector"s zeal was no doubt an edifying one to his parishioners, they gave him to understand that they would have been satisfied with less. They admired, but chided him gently; and in February Mr. Parr offered to take him to Florida. He was tired, and it was largely because he dreaded the reflection inevitable in a period of rest, that he refused.... And throughout these months, the feeling recurred, with increased strength, that McCrae was still watching him,--the notion persisted that his a.s.sistant held to a theory of his own, if he could but be induced to reveal it. Hodder refrained from making the appeal. Sometimes he was on the point of losing patience with this enigmatic person.
Congratulations on the fact that his congregation was increasing brought him little comfort, since a cold a.n.a.lysis of the newcomers who were renting pews was in itself an indication of the lack of that thing he so vainly sought. The decorous families who were now allying themselves with St. John"s did so at the expense of other churches either more radical or less fashionable. What was it he sought? What did he wish?
To fill the church to overflowing with the poor and needy as well as the rich, and to enter into the lives of all. Yet at a certain point he met a resistance that was no less firm because it was baffling. The Word, on his lips at least, seemed to have lost it efficacy. The poor heeded it not, and he preached to the rich as from behind a gla.s.s. They went on with their carnival. Why this insatiate ambition on his part in an age of unbelief? Other clergymen, not half so fortunate, were apparently satisfied; or else--from his conversation with them--either oddly optimistic or resigned. Why not he?
It was strange, in spite of everything, that hope sprang up within him, a recurrent geyser.
Gradually, almost imperceptibly, he found himself turning more and more towards that line of least resistance which other churches were following, as the one Modern Solution,--inst.i.tutional work. After all, in the rescuing of bodies some method might yet be discovered to revive the souls. And there were the children! Hodder might have been likened to an explorer, seeking a direct path when there was none--a royal road.
And if this were oblique it offered, at least, a definite outlet for his energy.
Such was, approximately, the state of his mind early in March when Gordon Atterbury came back from a conference in New York on inst.i.tutional work, and filled with enthusiasm. St. John"s was incredibly behind the times, so he told Hodder, and later the vestry.
Now that they had, in Mr. Hodder, a man of action and ability--ahem!
there was no excuse for a parish as wealthy as St. John"s, a parish with their opportunities, considering the proximity of Dalton Street neighbourhood, not enlarging and modernizing the parish house, not building a settlement house with kindergartens, schools, workshops, libraries, a dispensary and day nurseries. It would undoubtedly be an expense--and Mr. Atterbury looked at Mr. Parr, who drummed on the vestry table. They would need extra a.s.sistants, deaconesses, trained nurses, and all that. But there were other churches in the city that were ahead of St. John"s--a reproach--ahem!
Mr. Parr replied that he had told the rector that he stood ready to contribute to such a scheme when he, the rector; should be ready to approve it. And he looked at Mr. Hodder.