Chapter Twelve

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_ It was Catia, then, or, rather, Kathryn, who kept a weather eye upon the social powers of the parish. Brenton was too busy doing other things. Somebody, though, she argued, must look out for the personal end of life, as well as for the theological. Else, the parish would fall to pieces about their ears. Brenton might be giving them the bread of life; but man should not live by bread alone. He needed an occasional cup of afternoon tea to wash it down. Therefore Kathryn revised her social balance sheets often and with the utmost care. Out of deference to what Kathryn was still pleased to term her husband's cloth, the Brentons promptly had been received into the inmost circles of the college set, an honour which they shared with Prather, the fussy little novelist. Kathryn liked the novelist; he was such an unctuous, eager little man, so redolent of the elements that went into his careful grooming. She even tried in vain to read his novels; but they proved too much for her. She explained to him that his local colour was so brilliant that it dazzled her; but the ignoble truth was that she found it boring, although her letters going out of town were splashed thickly with his name. At the faculty wives Kathryn looked askance. They most of them knew things and they wore their clothes as if they were accustomed to them. Nevertheless, they seemed to her a little bit old-fashioned. Some of the grown-up daughters, the ones who had not been in college, she liked a little better. Nevertheless, Kathryn's attempts at closest comradeship were with certain of the young instructors. She told herself that she was mothering them, giving their homeless selves an outlook on domestic life. What the young instructors told, would be better for the editing. Indeed, it was somewhat edited and pruned of its finest flowers of speech, out of loyalty to Brenton whom they one and all admired exceedingly. Brenton himself, meanwhile, though liking those jovial youngsters who, in reality, were of his age and epoch, was finding his most satisfying intimacy in the friendship of two of the older men: Doctor Eustace Keltridge, and Professor Opdyke. Of the two of them, both mellow men of learning and of kindly humour, Doctor Keltridge was easily first choice. Before Scott Brenton had been a month over Saint Peter's Parish, he had fallen into the habit of dropping in upon the doctor at all sorts of hours and upon all sorts of pretexts, now smoking with him in the library and discussing things ecclesiastical, now following him into the laboratory, to hang above the trays of cultures, or the charts of perverse fever cases, while the doctor expounded and predicted, laying down the law with voice and fist and trenchant word. He saw Olive, as a rule, when he was passing in and out. Sometimes they merely nodded from afar, sometimes they had a little conversation. It was always as immaterial as possible, yet it never failed to have a little flavour of personal and friendly understanding. Next to the absent-minded and erratic doctor, Brenton's loyalty was given to Professor Opdyke. At the very first, the consciousness that the gray-haired professor was father to his old-time idol had made all the difference; but, after a time, that fact sank into insignificance beside the personality of the man himself. Never was any artist more devoted to his medium, whether that medium were water colours or progressive harmonies, than was Professor Opdyke to his balances and his blow-pipes, to his effervescent mixtures and to his most unholy smells. His laboratory was his studio, a place apart from all the outside world, the threshold where he was content to stand and knock, waiting in perfect, reverential patience until the mysterious door ahead of him should open just a very little wider. To the outward eye, he was languid, indifferent, a little cynical and prone to boredom. Underneath it, though, the fires of his enthusiasm, of his ambition to advance, not his own career, but the sum total of scientific knowledge: this fire was burning at white heat. Indeed, it cost him something to bank down the flame upon the side of his nature which lay open to the general view. His somewhat cynical humour was the material which he selected for the banking. Professor Opdyke almost never was betrayed into the sin of talking shop. Upon the rare occasions that he gave himself the privilege, save to his classes, he insisted upon but one congenial hearer, and that that one should be with him behind closed doors. More and more often, as the second winter of his acquaintance with Brenton went on, he chose Brenton as the one hearer he allowed himself. This was partly by reason of Brenton's interest in Reed, for, whatever his habit with his chemistry, it must be confessed that Professor Opdyke talked in season and out about his son. Partly, too, it came by way of Professor Mansfield whose introduction of Brenton would have been the Open, Sesame to any sanctum in America. Most of all, though, it came from Brenton himself, from the young rector's manifest enthusiasm for all that went under the name of chemistry, an enthusiasm based, as Professor Opdyke made prompt discovery, upon no mere smattering of knowledge. Bit by bit, then, the professor lowered the guard he had built up before his holy places, relaxed the vigilance of his watch upon them lest they should be invaded by the careless feet of those that did not comprehend. Scott Brenton did comprehend. To him, experimenting was an act of reverence, not a deed of idle curiosity. The world-laws were, to him, full of purpose, albeit only half revealed; and blessed was he who should assist in the revealing. Brenton, listening, talking in his turn, sometimes questioning, sometimes uttering a trenchant bit of argument, felt the old impulses stirring within him, felt the old love of science renewing its hold upon his heart and brain. Not that he regretted his holy calling; at least, not yet. It was a goodly privilege to be allowed to set forth to all men the modern, elastic gospel of good will coupled with a bowing acquaintance with the sciences. Much might be done, that way, he told himself, while steadily he disregarded the voices whispering in his ears that he was offering his parishioners a set of pretty painted toys instead of the rugged, vital facts of universal law. Still, the toys were prettier and vastly more refined than were the old-time goblins of his mother's day, the goblins marched to and fro persistently by half a score of Parson Wheelers in their time. Those were monstrosities, palpably of human creation and yet in the likeness of no mortal thing. The toys he offered to his people were at least shaped and coloured into dainty imitation of existing facts. So far as he helped on the substitution, he was a benefactor to all mankind. And yet, it would have been good to bare his hands and arms, and with them grasp and wrestle with the naked facts, elusive facts, despite their ruggedness. Nevertheless, he bravely smothered his desires. He even, and to himself, professed to ignore the way they multiplied, after an afternoon in the society of Professor Opdyke. However, ignore them as he would and did, they burnt within him with an increasing fierceness, burnt away, indeed, some of the scaffolding upon which his system of theology had reared itself. More than a little of this conflagration the professor realized. Also he realized its potential danger. If the scaffolding began to go, what then? Would the flames blaze up all the higher on the heap of fallen ruins; or would the ice water which, in the Parson Wheelers, had taken the place of good red blood, spurt from the veins of this, their latter-day descendant, and quench the fires before they reached the superstructure of his faith? The professor realized to the full, moreover, his personal accountability in the matter. None the less, he could never quite decide where the real right lay. Should he ignore the possible loss to science or should he help on the probable loss to theologic eloquence? He shook his head at the question. Like all true scientists, he must hold himself impartial. Asked, however, he surely had no moral right to withhold facts from a mature mind like that of Scott Brenton. Facts he would give, and plainly, and without modification or omission. There, though, he would stop. The inferences which Brenton should draw out from them should be no concern of his. And Scott Brenton who, from the start, had had a trick of drawing inferences to suit himself, was all the better pleased on that account. By degrees, then, the intimacy between the two men waxed strong. The one imparted things; the other absorbed them greedily. As time went on, there were few days in the week which did not find them together at some hour and place or other: in the laboratory, in the rector's study at the church, on the golf links, or scouring the hill and valley roads that stretched out, a lovely network to enmesh the town. One such walk had been scheduled for a day in April, a day when the whole physical world is a fragrant commentary on the truths of resurrection. The professor, it had been agreed, should call for Brenton at two. At half-past two, he had not appeared; and Brenton, loath to lose his half-day in the open, set out in search of him. As a matter of course, the search began in the outer laboratory where, in all probability, the professor had been hindered by a student grappling either with conscience or a condition, perhaps, indeed, with both combined. Such things had happened more than once in Brenton's experience of the department. The fact that it was a girls' college, though, made the earlier alternative more probable than was the later one. Brenton smiled a little, as he thanked his lucky stars that it was not the custom of the college girls to haunt their spiritual pilots as insistently as some of them haunted their mental ones. Smiling still, he doffed his hat before the dozen girls in the outer laboratory, while he looked about him. Professor Opdyke was not there. After an instant's hesitation, Brenton crossed the intervening strip of floor and tapped upon the door leading to the private laboratory beyond. "Come in." The voice was more than a trifle husky; and the professor's chair was carefully planted with its high back to the light. The professor was in the chair, and bent above the table which, Brenton's quick eye noted, was bare of anything that looked like work. As Brenton's face appeared in the doorway, Professor Opdyke looked up at him in a vague uncertainty which all at once changed to a guilty recognition. "Brenton! I quite forgot. I'm very sorry," he said; but his voice lacked all resonance. "The fact is, I've had news from Reed." "Bad?" The curt monosyllable was kinder than many words. The professor nodded. "There's been an accident." "He's not--" Brenton faltered at the grisly word, not so much in mercy to the father, seated there before him, as because the old-time love for that father's son seemed to rise up and catch him by the throat and strangle him. The Professor gave a long, shuddering sigh, the sigh of a woman verging on hysterics. "No; not that--yet. They'll wire again, to-night, they tell me." "When did you hear?" "Just now. An hour ago. His mother doesn't know it yet. Brenton, I've got to tell her." And the professor turned a wan, appealing face up to the younger man, as though in search of help. "Yes." The single word fell heavily. "You must." But Brenton, even while he was speaking, shut his teeth upon the thought. Then the priest within him rallied to the need, although the latent man of science in him forbade him to accompany the rallying with many words. "Can I be of any help?" "If you feel you could go to the house with me, Brenton. You knew Reed." Brenton's alert ear caught the unconscious change of tense. He interrupted with a question. "Just how bad is it?" "I don't know. 'Badly hurt', the telegram says. 'Will wire again in a few hours'. I suppose it's the same old story: an explosive and a panic. Somebody probably tried to stir a fire with a stick of frozen dynamite, or some such foolery as that." The scorn in the words came from the effort at self-mastery. Then the professor rose and looked about him vaguely for his hat. When he had found it, "Come along," he bade Brenton shortly. "We've got to get it over, even if it kills her. I believe in anæsthetics and hypnosis in such a case as this: drugging the victim and then impressing on him that he has always known the trouble and that it's certain to come out all right in time. Well, are you coming?" The voice sharpened again in its impatience to have the bad hour over. Out in the street and walking rapidly towards home, the professor spoke once more. This time, there was no sharpness, but rather the same note of appeal which Brenton had heard a little earlier. "Brenton, it's your chance now. I've been showing you the best of all my science. Now, for God's sake, give me back the best of your religion. In a time like this, science can't help us much. It shows us all the worst of things, and shuts down before whatever best there is. If your religion is any good at all, now is the time we need to make it count. Else, what's its use?" Before the unexpected, swift appeal, Brenton was dumb. What was the use, especially to a man like Professor Opdyke? It was all very well to talk about Reed's being safe in his Maker's hands, when common sense and science alike were insisting upon it that it was in all probability the hands of the surgeon who could rescue him from peril; that much less depended upon prayer than on the sterilizing processes. Of course, no one, however scientific, could deny the Master's law at the back of everything; but that law was a trifle too remote to be a potent source of comfort to a quivering mind. Besides, when, in all probability, it was that same law, either in breach or in observance, which had caused the trouble, it seemed a little bit unmerciful to brandish the cause as an instrument of healing. After all, in such a case as this, what was religion good for? One believed things, but only so far as they were based on law; and law is a stiff sort of moral plaster to apply to a bleeding wound. Of course, there was an infinite array of platitudes, phrased to fit every sort of emergency known to man. However, in a crisis such as this, it seemed to Brenton something little short of deliberate insult to offer a platitude to a man of Professor Opdyke's sort. All he could find to do, then, was to stand by and hold himself and them quite steady. And stand by steadily he did, all through that interminable April afternoon while the sun came sifting down through the elm buds, to throw irrelevant golden splashes across their gloom; while the merry voices of the college girls, passing by in the street outside, came floating in across their waiting silence. There was nothing in the world that he could do, except to be there and, now and then, to stave off a caller too insistent to be appeased by any bulletin issued by the maid. Among those callers was Prather, the novelist. Priest though he was, Brenton was conscious of a human and athletic wish to wring his neck, so palpably was his expression of fussy sympathy mingled with the professional sense of copy latent in the situation. And at last, when twilight had dulled the sunshine and sent the chattering, laughing college girls home to supper, a messenger boy came to the door to bring a yellow envelope. Professor Opdyke tore it open. Then, forgetful of his science,-- "Thank God!" he said quite simply, as he read the message to his wife. Next morning early, Brenton went to them again. He found them taking breakfast with good appetite, while they made an infinite variety of plans for the home-coming of the invalid. There had been two more telegrams, the previous evening, and a night letter had followed them. To Brenton, however, the particulars seemed glorious rather than reassuring. Instead of the fire stirred with a stick of dynamite, there had been something infinitely more deadly. A careless blast, set off by an inexperienced miner, had brought down a fall of rock where it had been least expected. A dozen men had been injured, and some of the shoring had been loosened, imperilling the lives of many more. No reasonably sane consulting engineer, however conscientious, could have imagined it his duty to lead the work of rescue. Measured by the value to the corporation, his one brain was worth a dozen score of miners' lives. Nevertheless, Reed Opdyke had not viewed the matter in that light. He was alert and strong, trained to face every possible emergency known underground. Moreover, he knew better than any other man the conditions likely to be existent in the dismantled vein. Therefore it was Reed Opdyke who had led the first of the rescue parties. Quite as a matter of course, he had made his way directly to the injured men, had helped to carry them back safely to the main shaft. Providence always looks out for little things like that. It uses its tools before it blunts them. Then Opdyke had gone back again into the vein, to see if he could make up his mind, at a superficial glance, concerning the extent of the damage and the best chances for repairing it. It was then that he found one more miner, wedged between the loosened timbers of the shoring. At best, minutes were ahead of him, not hours. At best, the danger in freeing him was almost infinite. None the less, while other men faltered and drew back, afraid, Opdyke had sent an ax crashing into the weakened timbers. All this was told to the professor briefly. The rest of the message was couched in terms so surgical as to convey scant meaning to Scott Brenton's brain. At the very end, there were two dates, both only possible, both so remote as to turn Brenton sick at heart. Was it for this that such men as Reed Opdyke were created? Was nature merciless, was law, that it ordained such pitiful, pitiless waste? It was with these questions ringing in his brain, then, that Scott Brenton, after his old fashion, shut his teeth askew and awaited the still distant homecoming of his old-time idol. He gained the slimmest sort of comfort by remembering how characteristic it all was of the boy he used to know. _

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