The Inside of the Cup
CHAPTER IV
SOME RIDDLES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
I Although he found the complications of a modern city parish somewhat
bewildering, the new rector entered into his duties that winter with apostolic
zeal. He was aware of limitations and anomalies, but his faith was boundless,
his energy the subject of good-natured comment by his vestry and parishioners,
whose pressing invitations' to dinners he was often compelled to refuse. There
was in John Hodder something indefinable that inflamed curiosity and left it
unsatisfied.
His excuse for attending these dinners, which indeed were relaxing and
enjoyable, he found in the obvious duty of getting to know the most important
members of his congregation. But invariably he came away from them with an inner
sense of having been baffled in this object. With a few exceptions, these modern
people seemed to have no time for friendship in the real meaning of the word, no
desire to carry a relationship beyond a certain point. Although he was their
spiritual pastor, he knew less about most of them at the end of the winter than
their butlers and their maids.
They were kind, they were delightful, they were interested in him—he
occasionally thought—as a somewhat anachronistic phenomenon. They petted,
respected him, and deferred to him. He represented to them an element in life
they recognized, and which had its proper niche. What they failed to acknowledge
was his point of view—and this he was wise enough not to press at dinner tables
and in drawing-rooms—that religion should have the penetrability of ether; that
it should be the absorbent of life. He did not have to commit the banality of
reminding them of this conviction of his at their own tables; he had sufficient
humour and penetration to credit them with knowing it. Nay, he went farther in
his unsuspected analysis, and perceived that these beliefs made one of his chief
attractions for them. It was pleasant to have authority in a black coat at one's
board; to defer, if not to bend to it. The traditions of fashion demanded a
clergyman in the milieu, and the more tenaciously he clung to his prerogatives,
the better they liked it.
Although they were conscious of a certain pressure, which they gently
resisted, they did not divine that the radiating and rugged young man cherished
serious designs upon them. He did not expect to transform the world in a day,
especially the modern world. He was biding his time, awaiting individual
opportunities.
They talked to him of the parish work, congratulated him on the vigour with
which he had attacked it, and often declared themselves jealous of it because it
claimed too much of him. Dear Dr. Gilman, they said, had had neither the
strength nor the perception of 'modern needs; and McCrae, the first assistant
clergyman, while a good man, was a plodder and lacking in imagination. They
talked sympathetically about the problems of the poor. And some of
them—particularly Mrs. Wallis Plimpton were inclined to think Hodder's replies a
trifle noncommittal. The trouble, although he did not tell them so, was that he
himself had by no means solved the problem. And he felt a certain reluctance to
discuss the riddle of poverty over champagne and porcelain.
Mrs. Plimpton and Mrs. Constable, Mrs. Ferguson, Mrs. Langmaid, Mrs.
Larrabbee, Mrs. Atterbury, Mrs. Grey, and many other ladies and their daughters
were honorary members of his guilds and societies, and found time in their busy
lives to decorate the church, adorn the altar, care for the vestments, and visit
the parish house. Some of them did more: Mrs. Larrabbee, for instance, when she
was in town, often graced the girls' classes with her presence, which was a
little disquieting to the daughters of immigrants: a little disquieting, too, to
John Hodder. During the three years that had elapsed since Mr. Larrabbee's
death, she had, with characteristic grace and ease, taken up philanthropy;
become, in particular, the feminine patron saint of Galt House, non-sectarian, a
rescue home for the erring of her sex.
There were, too, in this higher realm of wealth in and out of which Hodder
plunged, women like Mrs. Constable (much older than Mrs. Larrabbee) with whom
philanthropy and what is known as "church work" had become second nature in a
well-ordered life, and who attended with praiseworthy regularity the meetings of
charitable boards and committees, not infrequently taking an interest in
individuals in Mr. Hodder's classes. With her, on occasions, he did discuss such
matters, only to come away from her with his bewilderment deepened.
It was only natural that he should have his moods of depression. But the
recurrent flow of his energy swept them away. Cynicism had no place in his
militant Christianity, and yet there were times when he wondered whether these
good people really wished achievements from their rector. They had the air of
saying "Bravo!" and then of turning away. And he did not conceal from himself
that he was really doing nothing but labour. The distances were great; and
between his dinner parties, classes, services, and visits, he was forced to sit
far into the night preparing his sermons, when his brain was not so keen as it
might have been. Indeed—and this thought was cynical and out of character—he
asked himself on one occasion whether his principal achievement so far had not
consisted in getting on unusual terms with Eldon Parr. They were not lacking who
thought so, and who did not hesitate to imply it. They evidently regarded his
growing intimacy with the banker with approval, as in some sort a supreme
qualification for a rector of St. John's, and a proof of unusual abilities.
There could be no question, for instance, that he had advanced perceptibly in
the estimation of the wife of another of his vestrymen, Mrs. Wallis Plimpton.
The daughter of Thurston Gore, with all her astuteness and real estate, was
of a naivete in regard to spiritual matters that Hodder had grown to recognize
as impermeable. In an evening gown, with a string of large pearls testing on her
firm and glowing neck, she appeared a concrete refutation of the notion of
rebirth, the triumph of an unconscious philosophy of material common-sense.
However, in parish house affairs, Hodder had found her practical brain of no
slight assistance.
"I think it quite wonderful," she remarked, on the occasion at which he was
the guest of honour in what was still called the new Gore mansion, "that you
have come to know Mr. Parr so well in such a short time. How did you do it, Mr.
Hodder? Of course Wallis knows him, and sees a great deal of him in business
matters. He relies on Wallis. But they tell me you have grown more intimate with
him than any one has been since Alison left him."
There is, in Proverbs or Ecclesiastes, a formula for answering people in
accordance with their point of view. The rector modestly disclaimed intimacy.
And he curbed his curiosity about Alison for the reason that he preferred to
hear her story from another source.
"Oh, but you are intimate!" Mrs. Plimpton protested. "Everybody says so—that
Mr. Parr sends for you all the time. What is he like when he's alone, and
relaxed? Is he ever relaxed?" The lady had a habit of not waiting for answers to
her questions. "Do you know, it stirs my imagination tremendously when I think
of all the power that man has. I suppose you know he has become one of a very
small group of men who control this country, and naturally he has been cruelly
maligned. All he has to do is to say a word to his secretary, and he can make
men or ruin them. It isn't that he does ruin them—I don't mean that. He uses his
wealth, Wallis says, to maintain the prosperity of the nation! He feels his
trusteeship. And he is so generous! He has given a great deal to the church, and
now," she added, "I am sure he will give more."
Hodder was appalled. He felt helpless before the weight of this onslaught.
"I dare say he will continue to assist, as he has in the past," he managed to
say.
"Of course it's your disinterestedness," she proclaimed, examining him
frankly. "He feels that you don't want anything. You always strike me as so
splendidly impartial, Mr. Hodder."
Fortunately, he was spared an answer. Mr. Plimpton, who was wont to apply his
gifts as a toastmaster to his own festivals, hailed him from the other end of
the table.
And Nelson Langmaid, who had fallen into the habit of dropping into Hodder's
rooms in the parish house on his way uptown for a chat about books, had been
struck by the rector's friendship with the banker.
"I don't understand how you managed it, Hodder, in such a short time," he
declared. "Mr. Parr's a difficult man. In all these years, I've been closer to
him than any one else, and I don't know him today half as well as you do."
"I didn't manage it," said Hodder, briefly.
"Well," replied the lawyer, quizzically, "you needn't eat me up. I'm sure you
didn't do it on purpose. If you had,—to use a Hibernian phrase,—you never would
have done it. I've seen it tried before. To tell you the truth, after I'd come
back from Bremerton, that was the one thing I was afraid of—that you mightn't
get along with him."
Hodder himself was at a loss to account for the relationship. It troubled him
vaguely, for Mr. Parr was the aggressor; and often at dusk, when Hodder was
working under his study lamp, the telephone would ring, and on taking down the
receiver he would hear the banker's voice. "I'm alone to-night, Mr. Hodder. Will
you come and have dinner with me?"
Had he known it, this was a different method of communication than that which
the financier usually employed, one which should have flattered him. If Wallis
Plimpton, for instance, had received such a personal message, the fact would not
have remained unknown the next day at his club. Sometimes it was impossible for
Hodder to go, and he said so; but he always went when he could.
The unwonted note of appeal (which the telephone seemed somehow to enhance)
in Mr. Parr's voice, never failed to find a response in the rector's heart, and
he would ponder over it as he walked across to Tower Street to take the electric
car for the six-mile trip westward.
This note of appeal he inevitably contrasted with the dry, matter-of-fact
reserve of his greeting at the great house, which loomed all the greater in the
darkness. Unsatisfactory, from many points of view, as these evenings were, they
served to keep whetted Hodder's curiosity as to the life of this extraordinary
man. All of its vaster significance for the world, its tremendous machinery, was
out of his sight.
Mr. Parr seemed indeed to regard the rest of his fellow-creatures with the
suspicion at which Langmaid had hinted, to look askance at the amenities people
tentatively held out to him. And the private watchman whom Hodder sometimes met
in the darkness, and who invariably scrutinized pedestrians on Park Street,
seemed symbolic, of this attitude. On rare occasions, when in town, the
financier dined out, limiting himself to a few houses.
Once in a long while he attended what are known as banquets, such as those
given by the Chamber of Commerce, though he generally refused to speak. Hodder,
through Mr. Parr's intervention, had gone to one of these, ably and breezily
presided over by the versatile Mr. Plimpton.
Hodder felt not only curiosity and sympathy, but a vexing sense of the
fruitlessness of his visits to Park Street. Mr. Parr seemed to like to have him
there. And the very fact that the conversation rarely took any vital turn oddly
contributed to the increasing permanence of the lien. To venture on any topic
relating to the affairs of the day were merely to summon forth the banker's
dogmatism, and Hodder's own opinions on such matters were now in a strange and
unsettled state. Mr. Parr liked best to talk of his treasures, and of the
circumstances during his trips abroad that had led to their acquirement. Once
the banker had asked him about parish house matters.
"I'm told you're working very hard—stirring up McCrae. He needs it."
"I'm only trying to study the situation," Hodder replied. "I don't think you
quite do justice to McCrae," he added; "he's very faithful, and seems to
understand those people thoroughly."
Mr. Parr smiled.
"And what conclusions have you come to? If you think the system should be
enlarged and reorganized I am willing at any time to go over it with you, with a
view to making an additional contribution. Personally, while I have sympathy for
the unfortunate, I'm not at all sure that much of the energy and money put into
the institutional work of churches isn't wasted."
"I haven't come to any conclusions—yet," said the rector, with a touch of
sadness. "Perhaps I demand too much—expect too much."
The financier, deep in his leather chair under the shaded light, the tips of
his fingers pressed together, regarded the younger man thoughtfully, but the
smile lingered in his eyes.
"I told you you would meet problems," he said.
II
Hodder's cosmos might have been compared, indeed, to that set forth in the
Ptolemaic theory of the ancients. Like a cleverly carved Chinese object of ivory
in the banker's collection, it was a system of spheres, touching, concentric,
yet separate. In an outer space swung Mr. Parr; then came the scarcely less
rarefied atmosphere of the Constables and Atterburys, Fergusons, Plimptons,
Langmaids, Prestons, Larrabbees, Greys, and Gores, and then a smaller sphere
which claims but a passing mention. There were, in the congregation of St.
John's, a few people of moderate means whose houses or apartments the rector
visited; people to whom modern life was increasingly perplexing.
In these ranks were certain maiden ladies and widows who found in church work
an outlet to an otherwise circumscribed existence. Hodder met them continually
in his daily rounds. There were people like the Bradleys, who rented half a pew
and never missed a Sunday; Mr. Bradley, an elderly man whose children had
scattered, was an upper clerk in one of Mr. Parr's trust companies: there were
bachelors and young women, married or single, who taught in the Sunday school or
helped with the night classes. For the most part, all of these mentioned above
belonged to an element that once had had a comfortable and well-recognized place
in the community, yet had somehow been displaced. Many of them were connected by
blood with more fortunate parishioners, but economic pressure had scattered them
throughout new neighbourhoods and suburbs. Tradition still bound them to St.
John's.
With no fixed orbit, the rector cut at random through all of these strata,
and into a fourth. Not very far into it, for this apparently went down to
limitless depths, the very contemplation of which made him dizzy. The parish
house seemed to float precariously on its surface.
Owing partly to the old-fashioned ideas of Dr. Gilman, and partly to the
conservatism of its vestry, the institutionalism of St. John's was by no means
up to date. No settlement house, with day nurseries, was maintained in the
slums. The parish house, built in the early nineties, had its gymnasium hall and
class and reading rooms, but was not what in these rapidly moving times would be
called modern. Presiding over its activities, and seconded by a pale, but
earnest young man recently ordained, was Hodder's first assistant, the Reverend
Mr. McCrae.
McCrae was another puzzle. He was fifty and gaunt, with a wide flat forehead
and thinning, grey hair, and wore steel spectacles. He had a numerous family.
His speech, of which he was sparing, bore strong traces of a Caledonian accent.
And this, with the addition of the fact that he was painstaking and methodical
in his duties, and that his sermons were orthodox in the sense that they were
extremely non-committal, was all that Hodder knew about him for many months. He
never doubted, however, the man's sincerity and loyalty.
But McCrae had a peculiar effect on him, and as time went on, his conviction
deepened that his assistant was watching him. The fact that this tacit criticism
did not seem unkindly did not greatly alleviate the impatience that he felt from
time to time. He had formed a higher estimate of McCrae's abilities than that
generally prevailing throughout the parish; and in spite of, perhaps because of
his attitude, was drawn toward the man. This attitude, as Hodder analyzed it
from the expressions he occasionally surprised on his assistant's face, was one
of tolerance and experience, contemplating, with a faint amusement and a certain
regret, the wasteful expenditure of youthful vitality. Yet it involved more.
McCrae looked as if he knew—knew many things that he deemed it necessary for the
new rector to find out by experience.
But he was a difficult man to talk to.
If the truth be told, the more Hodder became absorbed in these activities of
the parish house, the greater grew his perplexity, the more acute his feeling of
incompleteness; or rather, his sense that the principle was somehow
fundamentally at fault. Out of the waters of the proletariat they fished,
assiduously and benignly, but at random, strange specimens! brought them, as it
were, blinking to the light, and held them by sheer struggling. And sometimes,
when they slipped away, dived after them. The young curate, Mr. Tompkinson, for
the most part did the diving; or, in scriptural language, the searching after
the lost sheep.
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 destitute. 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 assistant 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 pronounced it
releegion—"and see what happens. Ye'll have no classes 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 asserted. "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 Baldassaro 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.
"But there is room in the back and sides of the church, and there is the
early service and the Sunday night service, when the pews are free. Why don't
they come to these?"
"Religion doesn't appeal to them."
"Why not?"
"Ye've asked me a riddle. All I know is that the minute ye begin to preach,
off they go and never come back."
Hodder, with unconscious fixity, looked into his assistant's honest face. He
had an exasperating notion that McCrae might have said more, if he would.
"Haven't you a theory?"
"Try yourself," said McCrae. His manner was abrupt, yet oddly enough, not
ungracious.
"Don't think I'm criticizing," said the rector, quickly.
"I know well ye're not."
"I've been trying to learn. It seems to me that we are only accomplishing
half our task, and I know that St. John's is not unique in this respect. I've
been talking to Andrews, of Trinity, about their poor."
"Does he give you a remedy?"
"No," Hodder said. "He can't see any more than I can why Christianity doesn't
appeal any longer. The fathers and mothers of these people went to church, in
the old country and in this. Of course he sees, as you and I do, that society
has settled into layers, and that the layers won't mix. And he seems to agree
with me that there is a good deal of energy exerted for a comparatively small
return."
"I understand that's what Mr. Parr says."
These references to Mr. Parr disturbed Hodder. He had sometimes wondered,
when he had been compelled to speak about his visits to the financier, how
McCrae regarded them. He was sure that McCrae did regard them.
"Mr. Parr is willing to be even more generous than he has been," Hodder said.
"The point is, whether it's wise to enlarge our scope on the present plan. What
do you think?"
"Ye can reach more," McCrae spoke without enthusiasm.
"What's the use of reaching them, only to touch them? In addition to being
helped materially and socially, and kept away from the dance-halls and saloons,
they ought to be fired by the Gospels, to be remade. They should be going out
into the highways and byways to bring others into the church."
The Scotchman's face changed a little. For an instant his eyes lighted up,
whether in sympathy or commiseration or both, Hodder could not tell.
"I'm with ye, Mr. Hodder, if ye'll show me the way. But oughtn't we to begin
at both ends?"
"At both ends?" Hodder repeated.
"Surely. With the people in the pews? Oughtn't we to be firing them, too?"
"Yes," said the rector. "You're right."
He turned away, to feel McCrae's hand on his sleeve.
"Maybe it will come, Mr. Hodder," he said. "There's no telling when the light
will strike in."
It was the nearest to optimism he had ever known his assistant to approach.
"McCrae," he asked, "have you ever tried to do anything with Dalton Street?"
"Dalton Street?"
The real McCrae, whom he had seemed to see emerging, retired abruptly,
presenting his former baffling and noncommittal exterior.
"Yes," Hodder forced himself to go on, and it came to him that he had
repeated virtually the same words to Mr. Parr, "it is at our very doors, a
continual reproach. There is real poverty in those rooming houses, and I have
never seen vice so defiant and shameless."
"It's a shifty place, that," McCrae replied. "They're in it one day and gone
the next, a sort of catch-basin for all the rubbish of the city. I can recall
when decent people lived there, and now it's all light housekeeping and dives
and what not."
"But that doesn't relieve us of responsibility," Hodder observed.
"I'm not denying it. I think ye'll find there's very little to get hold of."
Once more, he had the air of stopping short, of being able to say more.
Hodder refrained from pressing him.
Dalton Street continued to haunt him. And often at nightfall, as he hurried
back to his bright rooms in the parish house from some of the many errands that
absorbed his time, he had a feeling of self-accusation as he avoided women
wearily treading the pavements, or girls and children plodding homeward through
the wet, wintry streets. Some glanced at him with heavy eyes, others passed
sullenly, with bent heads. At such moments his sense of helplessness was
overpowering. He could not follow them to the dreary dwellings where they
lodged.
Eldon Parr had said that poverty was inevitable.