His destination was the hill town where he had spent the first fifteen years of his life, amid the most striking of New England landscapes, and the sight of the steep yet delicately pastoral slopes never failed to thrill him as the train toiled up the wide valley to Bremerton. The vision of these had remained with him during the years of his toil in the growing Western city, and embodied from the first homesick days an ideal to which he hoped sometime permanently to return. But he never had. His family had shown a perversity of taste in preferring the sea, and he had perforce been content with a visit of a month or so every other summer, accompanied usually by his daughter, Helen. On such occasions, he stayed with his sister, Mrs. Whitely.
The Whitely mills were significant of the new Bremerton, now neither village nor city, but partaking of the characteristics of both. French Canadian might be heard on the main square as well as Yankee; and that revolutionary vehicle, the automobile, had inspired there a great brick edifice with a banner called the Bremerton House. Enterprising Italians had monopolized the corners with fruit stores, and plate gla.s.s and asphalt were in evidence. But the hills looked down unchanged, and in the cool, maple-shaded streets, though dotted with modern residences, were the same demure colonial houses he had known in boyhood.
He was met at the station by his sister, a large, matronly woman who invariably set the world whizzing backward for Langmaid; so completely did she typify the contentment, the point of view of an age gone by.
For life presented no more complicated problems to the middle-aged Mrs.
Whitely than it had to Alice Langmaid.
"I know what you"ve come for, Nelson," she said reproachfully, when she greeted him at the station. "Dr. Gilman"s dead, and you want our Mr.
Hodder. I feel it in my bones. Well, you can"t get him. He"s had ever so many calls, but he won"t leave Bremerton."
She knew perfectly well, however, that Nelson would get him, although her brother characteristically did not at once acknowledge his mission.
Alice Whitely had vivid memories of a childhood when he had never failed to get what he wanted; a trait of his of which, although it had before now caused her much discomfort, she was secretly inordinately proud. She was, therefore, later in the day not greatly surprised to find herself supplying her brother with arguments. Much as they admired and loved Mr. Hodder, they had always realized that he could not remain buried in Bremerton. His talents demanded a wider field.
"Talents!" exclaimed Langmaid, "I didn"t know he had any."
"Oh, Nelson, how can you say such a thing, when you came to get him!"
exclaimed his sister.
"I recommended him because I thought he had none," Langmaid declared.
"He"ll be a bishop some day--every one says so," said Mrs. Whitely, indignantly.
"That rea.s.sures me," said her brother.
"I can"t see why they sent you--you hardly ever go to church," she cried. "I don"t mind telling you, Nelson, that the confidence men place in you is absurd."
"You"ve said that before," he replied. "I agree with you. I"m not going on my judgment--but on yours and Gerald"s, because I know that you wouldn"t put up with anything that wasn"t strictly all-wool orthodox."
"I think you"re irreverent," said his sister, "and it"s a shame that the canons permit such persons to sit on the vestry...."
"Gerald," asked Nelson Langmaid of his brother-in-law that night, after his sister and the girls had gone to bed, "are you sure that this young man"s orthodox?"
"He"s been here for over ten years, ever since he left the seminary, and he"s never done or said anything radical yet," replied the mill owner of Bremerton. "If you don"t want him, we"d be delighted to have him stay.
We"re not forcing him on you, you know. What the deuce has got into you?
You"ve talked to him for two hours, and you"ve sat looking at him at the dinner table for another two. I thought you were a judge of men."
Nelson Langmaid sat silent.
"I"m only urging Hodder to go for his own good," Mr. Whitely continued.
"I can take you to dozens of people to-morrow morning who worship him,--people of all sorts; the cashier in the bank, men in the mills, the hotel clerk, my private stenographer--he"s built up that little church from nothing at all. And you may write the Bishop, if you wish."
"How has he built up the church?" Langmaid demanded
"How? How does any clergyman buildup a church
"I don"t know," Langmaid confessed. "It strikes me as quite a tour de force in these days. Does he manage to arouse enthusiasm for orthodox Christianity?"
"Well," said Gerard Whitely, "I think the service appeals. We"ve made it as beautiful as possible. And then Mr. Hodder goes to see these people and sits up with them, and they tell him their troubles. He"s reformed one or two rather bad cases. I suppose it"s the man"s personality."
Ah! Langmaid exclaimed, "now you"re talking!"
"I can"t see what you"re driving at," confessed his brother-in-law.
"You"re too deep for me, Nelson."
If the truth be told, Langmaid himself did not quits see. On behalf of the vestry, he offered next day to Mr. Hodder the rectorship of St.
John"s and that offer was taken under consideration; but there was in the lawyer"s mind no doubt of the acceptance, which, in the course of a fortnight after he had returned to the West, followed.
By no means a negligible element in Nelson Langmaid"s professional success had been his possession of what may called a sixth sense, and more than once, on his missions of trust, he had listened to its admonitory promptings.
At times he thought he recognized these in his conversation with the Reverend John Hodder at Bremerton,--especially in that last interview in the pleasant little study of the rectory overlooking Bremerton Lake. But the promptings were faint, and Langmaid out of his medium. He was not choosing the head of a trust company.
He himself felt the pull of the young clergyman"s personality, and instinctively strove to resist it: and was more than ever struck by Mr.
Hodder"s resemblance to the cliff sculpture of which he had spoken at the vestry meeting.
He was rough-hewn indeed, with gray-green eyes, and hair the color of golden sand: it would not stay brushed. It was this hair that hinted most strongly of individualism, that was by no means orthodox. Langmaid felt an incongruity, but he was fascinated; and he had discovered on the rector"s shelves evidences of the taste for cla.s.sical authors that he himself possessed. Thus fate played with him, and the two men ranged from Euripides to Horace, from Horace to Dante and Gibbon. And when Hodder got up to fetch this or that edition, he seemed to tower over the lawyer, who was a big man himself.
Then they discussed business, Langmaid describing the parish, the people, the peculiar situation in St. John"s caused by Dr. Gilman"s death, while Hodder listened. He was not talkative; he made no promises; his reserve on occasions was even a little disconcerting; and it appealed to the lawyer from Hodder as a man, but somehow not as a clergyman. Nor did the rector volunteer any evidences of the soundness of his theological or political principles.
He gave Langmaid the impression--though without apparent egotism--that by accepting the call he would be conferring a favour on St. John"s; and this was when he spoke with real feeling of the ties that bound him to Bremerton. Langmaid felt a certain deprecation of the fact that he was not a communicant.
For the rest, if Mr. Hodder were disposed to take himself and his profession seriously, he was by no means lacking in an appreciation of Langmaid"s humour....
The tempering of the lawyer"s elation as he returned homeward to report to Mr. Parr and the vestry may be best expressed by his own exclamation, which he made to himself:
"I wonder what that fellow would do if he ever got started!" A parson was, after all, a parson, and he had done his best.
IV
A high, oozing note of the brakes, and the heavy train came to a stop. Hodder looked out of the window of the sleeper to read the sign "Marcion" against the yellow brick of the station set down in the prairie mud, and flanked by a long row of dun-colored freight cars backed up to a factory.
The factory was flimsy, somewhat resembling a vast greenhouse with its mult.i.tudinous windows, and bore the name of a firm whose offices were in the city to which he was bound.
"We "most in now, sah," the negro porter volunteered. "You kin see the smoke yondah."
Hodder"s mood found a figure in this portentous sign whereby the city"s presence was betrayed to travellers from afar,--the huge pall seemed an emblem of the weight of the city"s sorrows; or again, a cloud of her own making which shut her in from the sight of heaven. Absorbed in the mad contest for life, for money and pleasure and power she felt no need to lift her eyes beyond the level of her material endeavours.
He, John Hodder, was to live under that cloud, to labour under it. The mission on which he was bound, like the prophets of old, was somehow to gain the ears of this self-absorbed population, to strike the fear of the eternal into their souls, to convince them that there was Something above and beyond that smoke which they ignored to their own peril.
Yet the task, at this nearer view, took on proportions overwhelming--so dense was that curtain at which he gazed. And to-day the very skies above it were leaden, as though Nature herself had turned atheist. In spite of the vigour with which he was endowed, in spite of the belief in his own soul, doubts a.s.sailed him of his ability to cope with this problem of the modern Nineveh--at the very moment when he was about to realize his matured ambition of a great city parish.
Leaning back on the cushioned seat, as the train started again, he reviewed the years at Bremerton, his first and only parish. Hitherto (to his surprise, since he had been prepared for trials) he had found the religious life a primrose path. Clouds had indeed rested on Bremerton"s crests, but beneficent clouds, always scattered by the sun. And there, amid the dazzling snows, he had on occasions walked with G.o.d.
His success, modest though it were, had been too simple. He had loved the people, and they him, and the pang of homesickness he now experienced was the intensest sorrow he had known since he had been among them. Yes, Bremerton had been for him (he realized now that he had left it) as near an approach to Arcadia as this life permits, and the very mountains by which it was encircled had seemed effectively to shut out those monster problems which had set the modern world outside to seething. Gerald Whitely"s thousand operatives had never struck; the New York newspapers, the magazines that discussed with vivid animus the corporation-political problems in other states, had found Bremerton interested, but unmoved; and Mrs. Whitely, who was a trustee of the library, wasted her energy in deploring the recent volumes on economics, sociology, philosophy, and religion that were placed on the shelves. If Bremerton read them--and a portion of Bremerton did--no difference was apparent in the attendance at Hodder"s church. The Woman"s Club discussed them strenuously, but made no attempt to put their doctrines into practice.
Hodder himself had but glanced at a few of them, and to do him justice this abstention had not had its root in cowardice. His life was full--his religion "worked." And the conditions with which these books dealt simply did not exist for him. The fact that there were other churches in the town less successful than his own (one or two, indeed, virtually starving) he had found it simple to account for in that their denominations had abandoned the true conception of the Church, and were logically degenerating into atrophy. What better proof of the barrenness of these modern philosophical and religious books did he need than the spectacle of other ministers--who tarried awhile on starvation salaries--reading them and preaching from them?