Chapter Eleven

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_ Saint Peter's Parish was unique in all New England. The trails of old and new in its experience crossed and crisscrossed at every point, causing a long succession of eccentricities which endeared themselves to the minds of the oldest inhabitants. However, even the oldest inhabitants breathed a deep sigh of relief, when finally they were housed in the brand-new church up beside the college campus, a real stone church, with transepts and painted windows and choir-stalls within, and a cloister and a grand tall tower without. The ramshackle old wooden church had been dear to them, had even remained dear to them after the railroad had laid down its tracks under their very eaves; but they were fretted by the crudely caustic comments of strangers coming to the town, and they were still more fretted when the puffing, screeching Sunday trains drowned the voice of the good old rector whose mannerly traditions forbade his puffing and screeching in his turn. He had been a dear old rector, rotund and pompous; and his surplice had been fully as long and voluminous as a Mother Hubbard nightie. Possibly it was on that account, to equalize the demand for muslin, that, in those same old days, the choir had worn no surplices at all, but had been accustomed to come tramping into church in all the bravery of sack coats and violent haberdashery. Indeed, upon the part of certain of the congregation, there had been a tendency to regard it as a finger-post to Rome, when some younger member of the vestry suggested putting the ban on scarlet neckties. Saint Peter's Parish was set like a holy beacon in the very midst of a valley which was tainted with heresies Arian and unspeakable, tainted so thoroughly that the ritualistic development of Saint Peter's was delayed for decades upon that account. Later, Saint Peter's became far wiser in its generation. Its policy had been to extend a cordial welcome to all men of whatever creed, and its early fathers had felt that it was surer to attract the more unstable of its neighbours, if it held its threshold at the common level of them all. In course of time, however, wisdom dawned and broadened to a perfect day of psychological common sense. A theological reaction, of whatever sort, was bound in the last analysis to be a matter of a sudden leap, not of a deliberate slide. One either took a veritable ski-jump into the next church but three, or else one merely stayed where one was, and fretted about the details of the service. It was now a good twenty years and more since Saint Peter's had abandoned its old barracks of a church and moved up town into its new quarters. As a matter of course, it had settled down as close as possible to the campus. A student congregation might be a bit unstable, taken as a parish; but it was distinctly lucrative, when it came to the point of counting up the offertory. Furthermore, as result of its Sunday-morning habits of arising, it was prone to turn in at the first church door that offered. Nowadays on Sunday mornings, Saint Peter's rector had no monopoly of surplices. The choir, discreetly garbed and outwardly reverential, warbled early English settings to the hymns, the while they came striding slowly up the aisle in a species of churchly goose-step that demanded a pause on each foot, to prevent the physical march outrunning the musical one. Nowadays, too, there was daily celebration; that is, when any one was sufficiently energetic to get up and get into church in time. What happened upon those other days, when the rector was abandoned to the rows of empty pews, was still a matter of profane conjecture. Discussed in whispers, it was agreed to be a subject best left to the disclosing hand of time. Into this elaborate and decorative harness, Scott Brenton was now breaking his young strength, his young ambition. In his old parish in the hills, it had been a question of preaching the best sermons that he could and looking out for his people in the intervals, rather than of forms and ceremonies and intonations of the Nicene Creed. In accepting the Bishop's intimation that Saint Peter's Parish would extend to him a welcoming hand, he had thought singularly little about the outward trappings of his priesthood. Catia knew it all; but she held her peace. The Bishop also had held his peace, and a little bit for the same reason that Catia had done. He knew the theological history of Scott Brenton; he knew that, like all half-broken colts, he easily might shy at first sight of the harness; yet, once with the harness on and fitted to his back, he would fall to work in earnest and pull steadily with the best of them. And it was the pulling that the Bishop wished, not the mere jingling of the farthingale. Under the last incumbent, Saint Peter's had been running down a little. It was not in all respects an easy parish; and Brenton, young, earnest and as magnetic as he was self-distrustful, was the very man to build it up. Nevertheless, the Bishop saw to it that Scott Brenton should never attend a service at Saint Peter's, until his acceptance of the parish was settled past all gainsaying. From the first morning of his reading service at Saint Peter's, Brenton had been aware that he was opening a fresh chapter of his life. In the old hillside parish, there had been things to do and souls to save. Here, it seemed to him that all the souls had been saved prenatally. As for the things to do, these people were too critical, too self-reliant to take kindly to the intimate sort of ministrations in which, of old, he had delighted. For the future, it would be the quality of his sermons that counted most, rather than his personal contact with his people. The congregation seemed to him conglomerate, a jumble of conflicting elements. There were the old, old residents and their offspring, people who squabbled violently among themselves as to whose ancestor came aboard the Mayflower first, and which in what capacity. There were the mediæval spinsters who always reach their best development in the semi-small New England town, spinsters who have clubs and theories, and yet play golf, and frivol delightfully above their luncheon tables. And there were college girls in hordes, alert young things, critical alike of evil and of good, of the hang of the back of a surplice where the shoulders stoop a little, and of the turning of the final phrases that naturally lead up to the And now--To Scott Brenton, looking down upon the students in the congregation, his first Sunday morning at Saint Peter's, their befeathered hats and their intent young faces seemed to him the masking labels upon a store of frozen dynamite. Thawed, it might serve for any amount of useful tunneling; it might go off explosively in the open, at almost any given instant. Taken all in all, it was upon the student fraction of his congregation that Brenton looked with greatest interest; it was to them, in greatest measure, that the best of his sermons preached themselves. The phrase is no slipshod inversion of the fact. The best of all sermons do preach themselves, both in their original inception and their ultimate delivery. All the so-called preacher does about it is to give the intermediate polishing to his projectile, and then to hold himself still, while it is going off, and watch what happens, by way of preparation for aiming his next shot. As a matter of course, with a target so unstable as a student audience, Brenton by no means hit the bull's-eye every time. That he did hit it occasionally, however, argues no mean ability, no paltry knowledge of youthful human nature. Over their Sunday dinners, the girls discussed his sermons with increasing vigour. The echoes of these discussions, coming to Brenton's ears, set him to preaching with increasing conscientiousness. However, there still was salvation for him; it was his sermons that he took so much in earnest, and not himself, the preacher. But, although it was upon his student hearers that Scott Brenton tossed down, broadcast and unsaving, the best of all he had within himself, it was among the permanent residents of Saint Peter's that his real work was supposed to be done. He did that work most faithfully; he showed himself both tireless and tactful in his arrangement of the parish mechanism, in his gathering up and straightening and knotting here and there the threads his predecessor had flung down in a tangled heap. Nevertheless, his heart was in the other end of his work, not for any individual interest in the different girls; but because his whole instinct told him that here was the dynamic force of the whole organization, that the rest of it was curiously static. Under those befeathered hats were eager brains which weighed their theology and measured it, not took it ready made. It was for him to serve it out to them in such a guise that, weighed, they should not find it wanting. Catia, on the other hand, looked upon the student end of her husband's parish with disapproving eyes. The girls annoyed her by their cocksure alertness, their little air of being primed, ready for any emergency that chanced to offer. They vexed her by their manifest absorption in her husband; they vexed her yet more by their inexplicable lack of interest in herself. Upon the older and more stable fraction of the parish, however, Catia lavished an interested affection which would have seemed well-nigh maternal, had it not been for the care she took to emphasize the gulf in age which yawned between herself and certain of the individuals who made up its list. She studied the list with no slight degree of care. By the end of their first month in the new parish, she knew to a nicety how the line of local social precedence ordered itself, where, at any point in the procession, town must yield to gown, or the reverse. She knew the lineage and history of all the wardens and their wives, and then of all the vestry-men; she even cultivated a nodding acquaintance with their family skeletons, and learned to recognize the seals upon the doors that, as a rule, hid them from public view. She knew the hobbies of the average prosperous member at large of the flock ecclesiastical, and made a series of elaborate calculations regarding the intersecting social orbits of those same members. As for the other, lesser members of the congregation, she had an especial kind of smile, half of sweetness, half of deprecation, that she bestowed upon each one of them in turn; but she never made the slightest effort to separate them, one from another, in her mind, or to return any of their calls. To Catia's astute brain, the duty of a rector's lady consisted in helping her husband up, not on. It was at about this epoch, too, that Catia ceased to be Catia and became Kathryn. In some respects, the most remarkable thing about the change was the suddenness with which it was announced to Scott. A dozen of them had been dining at the Keltridges', one night, six months or so after Brenton had come to take charge of the congregation of Saint Peter's. It was essentially a church-warden kind of dinner, with all the other wardens and their wives to meet the rector and his lady, the kind of dinner that one gives and goes to, out of stern necessity, when, all the time, one longs for something just a little less made up by rule of thumb. The one exception to the prevailing ecclesiastical flavour, that night, was in the person of a local novelist who, albeit suave and very bald, wrote novels of the raucous, woolly West. Moreover, like all other novelists, he rejoiced in talking shop. Accordingly, with the utmost expedition, he dragged the talk around to the law regarding the choice of names. "Of course," he expounded, for the benefit of whom it might concern; "the first thing I always do, when I go to work, is to name my characters. It's the hardest thing in the world to do--properly. You can stick any sort of name to any sort of character, I know; but that's not naming them. Not at all. The name must be a label; it must fit like a glove, and yet the character must be fitted to it. And most of the names I find are so trite." "Likewise the characters," Dolph Dennison assured him, sotto voce. Dolph, by way of his older brother, who was vestryman, might be termed sub-ecclesiastical. However, in any case, he would have been sure of a seat at the Keltridge dinner, even if all the other guests had been archbishops. It needs at least one such irresponsible youngster to act as appetizer for the solid things before him. Only Olive heard his comment. As a matter of course, Dolph's place was next to Olive. Long since, discerning hostesses had discovered that therein lay the only path to peace. Otherwise, Dolph either sulked palpably; or else ignored his other neighbour and shouted all his talk across the table into Olive's ears. Not that either Dolph or Olive had any notion of being at all in love with each other. It was merely that things struck them the same way at the same instant, and that Dolph, being young and a good deal spoiled, could see no reason against a prompt exchange of comments on the fact. Therefore, for the peace of the other people at the table, it had become a universal local law that, no matter who took Olive Keltridge out, Dolph Dennison should be placed at her other side. Olive, then, heard Dolph's comment and, what was infinitely worse, she feared the novelist had heard it, too. Therefore, to save the feelings of the bald little man, she flung herself into the talk. "I see exactly what you mean," she told him. "Your idea is that, when you have conceived a character that is wholly original--" "Ahem!" Dolph strangled suddenly. But Olive continued, without pause for flinching, for now the bald little novelist was facing her intently, and it was plain, from the tentative waggling of his beard, that he would mount his hobby and be off again, if she gave him so much as a comma's breadth by which to creep back into the talk. "Wholly original," she repeated sternly; "that it must be very trying to be obliged to descend to the every day of things, and name her Mamie." There came a peal of laughter at the accent with which Olive had contrived to endow the name. The peal was cut short, however, by the fussy accent of the little novelist. "You have hit the nail on the head, Miss Olive, distinctly on the head," he assured her, with a bow and smile so suave as to be devoid of meaning. "Really," and Olive felt as if she were a young child and he were offering her a stick of candy; "it was a very smart little tap. Yes, as you say, a Mamie is an anticlimax to one's best endeavours. Now, if all the ladies," Olive had a momentary longing to hurl a plate in his unctuous direction; "only were blessed with names like yours, we poor novelists would never be devoid of sources for our inspiration." "Encore!" remarked Dolph Dennison, with admirable gravity. Once again Olive sought to save the situation, as well as to remove the subject of the talk from resting solely on herself. "If that is all you want," she answered lightly; "you surely will find Mrs. Brenton's name offering you all sorts of inspiration, much better than anything mine could give." "Mrs. Brenton?" The little novelist was palpably uncertain as to whom the name belonged. He was not only Unitarian by theology, but inattentive by profession; and, moreover, he had but just returned from a copy-hunting trip in the direction of his raucous West. "Yes." Olive made signals of distress in the direction of the rector's wife who was bending above her salad, with every appearance of anxious absorption in her tour of discovery among its elements. Her colour betrayed her, though, and Olive judged it would be the part of wisdom to drag her by the heels into the talk. "Mrs. Brenton, I am just telling Mr. Prather what a benefactor you ought to be considered, according to his notion about names. Surely, yours is unusual enough to win his full approval." Even as she spoke, Olive realized the vapidness of her words and was ashamed of them. An instant later, though, her shame exchanged itself for astonishment. The rector's lady raised her brows, and spoke with studied carelessness. "Really, Miss Keltridge," she said calmly; "there is nothing so very unusual in the name of Kathryn." "Kathryn!" Olive fairly stuttered over her reply, for she saw Scott Brenton's eyes turn to his wife, and she read amazement in them, amazement and something else that was dangerously akin to contempt. "I thought your name was Catia, Mrs. Brenton." But Kathryn Brenton laid down her fork, as though the salad had ceased to interest her. Then she spoke, and her accent conveyed the same impression as concerned the conversation. "Oh, no; Catia is just a little nickname. That is all. My name is really Kathryn." And then, for an instant and to her lasting shame, Olive Keltridge's glance sought that of Brenton. Before the hurt and abased look in his deep gray eyes, her own eyes dropped, ashamed and pitiful. What right had she, in a moment so tragic, albeit so very, very petty, to spy upon him in his disappointment? What right to obtrude her honest sympathy upon his secret pain? She dropped her eyes, then, promptly. None the less, Scott Brenton realized that, alone of all the group about the table, Olive Keltridge had recognized both elements: the secret, and the pain. _

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