Chapter Twenty-Two

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_ "Still, Reed, I rather grudge the time," Whittenden said to his host when, dinner over, that same night, he flung himself into a chair at Opdyke's side. "For all practical purposes, it was a wasted afternoon. I'd much rather have been here with you." "You'd have been quite de trop, old man. Olive Keltridge was here, two hours, and filled me up with all the gossip of the town. Besides, you were filling yourself up with ozone, and preparing to make a night of it. Apropos--Ramsdell!" "Yes, sir?" Ramsdell appeared upon the threshold of the outer room. "Go to bed, like a Christian, when you get ready. No need for you to become a martyr, because Mr. Whittenden and I wish to carouse till all hours. When I need you, Mr. Whittenden will come to wake you, and you can appear in your pajamas, if you choose. Isn't that all right, Whittenden? Good night, Ramsdell." Then, as Ramsdell vanished, Reed settled himself with a little sigh. "It's a fearsome responsibility, Whittenden," he said; "to win this sort of sheep-dog devotion. Ramsdell, on my grilly days, would like nothing better than to stand and let me shy things at his head. It is beautiful; but it gets a trifle sultry. A little downright cussedness helps to clear the air occasionally; but cussèd is the one thing Ramsdell isn't. I suppose it is because he is the product of the ages; it goes with his misplaced aspirates." Whittenden struck a match. "The sheep-dog thing is worth the having, though. Best hang on to it, Reed. It doesn't come to most of us too often." Opdyke eyed him rather mirthfully. "What's the matter, man?" he queried. "Did your own sheep dog growl at you, this afternoon?" "Mine?" "Brenton. He counts you as the great formative influence of his life, and adores you accordingly." "Not now. I knew he had been through the phase, Opdyke. In fact, I had rather counted on its lasting; but it hasn't." "From which I infer that he showed his teeth, to-day. What was the matter? Did you try to stroke his head, and accidentally hit him on the raw?" "Not consciously. It's only that I've lost all my helpful grip on him." "How do you know?" "Because--to carry out your sheep-dog metaphor which, in reality, doesn't fit the case at all, Opdyke--he put his paw in mine, and then growled at me when I shook it." "I'm not so much surprised. Brenton has been on his nerves lately. I can't just see why, though." "Has he talked to you, Opdyke?" "Good Lord, yes! A man on his nerves is bound to talk to something, whether it's a responsible person like yourself, or a mere bedpost like me. It's the talking that's the main thing, the sense of exhilaration that comes with the discussion of depressing personalities. We're all alike, every man of us, Whittenden. Didn't I take my turn, last night?" "That's different." "Not a bit. Spine or conscience, it's all one, once it begins to raise a ruction. But about Brenton: how do you diagnose his disease?" Whittenden's reply came on the instant. "Trying to believe too many things too hard." "Hm!" Opdyke appeared to be considering. "Well, I think perhaps you've hit it. However, there are some extenuating circumstances. Give a man a dozen years or so of the mental starvation of a New England wilderness, and then all at once fill him chock full of new ideas, and he gets a pain within him, just as painful a pain as if it were in his tummy, not his mind. In time, it leads to chronic indigestion. That's what Brenton's got." "Yes; but that is cause, not extenuating circumstance," Whittenden objected. "It's extenuating, just the same. And then the wife! She is--" "Well?" "A pill," Reed said briefly. "What sort?" "Born common and dense. Grown self-centred and conceited. Lately turned from ultra-ritualistic to incipient Eddyism." "That's bad." "Isn't it? No wonder Brenton's down and out, for the time being. The question is how we are to prevent its becoming chronic. Of course, this is the bare outline; you can fill in the details out of your own experience." "Praise heaven, I haven't any!" Whittenden responded piously. "So much the better for you, and so very much the worse for Brenton. I had counted on your being here to haul him out of his present mental Turkish bath, and hang him out on the line in the fresh air and sun. I can't." Reed made an expressive grimace at the couch. "Besides, I'm a little bit like old Knut on the seashore; my own toes are getting very wet. The worst of that matter is that Brenton knows it." Whittenden spoke tranquilly, his eyes on Opdyke's face, sure that he could rely upon the sense of humour in his friend. "Yes, Brenton does know it. Do you realize, Opdyke, that you're the fellow who heated up his Turkish bath, in the first place?" "What!" The word exploded with a violence that brought Ramsdell's head in at the open doorway. "Yes, you." Opdyke smiled at Ramsdell, in token of dismissal. Then,-- "Not guilty!" he protested. "Yes, you are. I wormed it out of Brenton, in the end, in spite of his growling. It's too bad of me to tell you; and yet it seems only fair that you should get at the truth of the situation. Besides--You know you are a fearful egoist, Reed; we all are, for that matter. Besides, it may make you a little bit more tolerant of Brenton, may lead you to smooth him down where I have been rubbing him the wrong way. In fact, you owe it to him, to atone for the volcanic effect you have had on his theology." "Dear man, I haven't upset his blamed theology," Reed objected. "I'm sound enough; I wouldn't upset a mouse. Ask Ramsdell if I've ever argued against his belief in the literal greening apple, 'a wee bit hunripe, sir,' upon which Adam feasted." "Not in words. It's the fact of you that's so upsetting." "I've been accused unjustly of a good many things in my time, Whittenden. Besides," again there came the grimace at the couch; "it rather seems to me that I'm the one who has been upset." "That's the whole row. You are the first brick in the line. You bowled over Brenton; now he appears to be bowling over his wife. Yes, I mean it. If Brenton had held steady, she never would have wobbled, much less bolted off to Christian Science. She was keen enough to feel him tottering, and she evidently made up her mind to save herself from the impending ruins by taking refuge upon the other side of the street. I must say it was rather prudent of her. She had the sense to choose a new house built on a totally different stratum from her old one. If one collapsed, it couldn't well jar the other." "Hold on, Whittenden!" Reed broke in, after long waiting for a pause. "I am willing to take my share of blame for most things; but I'll be--" "Sh-h!" Whittenden warned him indolently. "Remember I'm a rector in good standing." "Then bring me a book of synonyms. Anyhow, I'll be it, before I'll take the responsibility of that Brenton woman's vagaries. Ask Olive." "I don't need to," Whittenden remarked at his cigar. "I married them. Likewise, I have seen Brenton, this very day. After collating those two references, I don't need Miss Keltridge for a commentary. As for Brenton--" Opdyke interrupted. "How do you figure out that I've been upsetting him?" he queried. Whittenden settled himself in his favourite position, low in his chair and with one hand flung upward to grasp the chair-top above his head. His eyes, fixed on Opdyke, were full of merriment. "Let's go back a little. When you first knew Brenton, he was a bit uncommon, the ordinary product of Calvinism flavoured with something vastly more hectic. That was inside him, that hectic splash in his blood; it made him imaginative, greedy of new ideas, greedy to prove that they were good. Moreover, he had been trained to believe that an irate Deity of unstable nerves presided over the universe; that He had created the world and beast and man in a series of experiments which had come off well, until it reached the last one, man; that man had gone bad in the making, and must be pursued and thrashed for all eternity on that account, unless he made an umbrella out of his acknowledged vices, and sat down underneath it and sang hymns to a harp accompaniment. Else, he was grilled eternally. But the gist of the whole matter was that man had gone bad in the making, and that his Maker was angry at him to the end of time. And that same blundering and angry Maker was the God one had to love and honour. Naturally, being constituted as he is, Brenton, once he had cut his wisdom teeth, turned balky, refused to see why he should love a God who behaved like a bad-tempered child that spites the toy he has broken and beats the wall where he has bumped his head. Meanwhile--" "Do I--" Opdyke was beginning. Whittenden waved aside the interruption. "No; you don't come in yet. Be patient. As I was going to say, meanwhile he went into his first laboratory and made the prompt discovery that nothing ever happens, that causes are set in motion ages and ages before they ever materialize into effects. That set him to thinking, set him to wondering why the thing that he was trained to call revealed religion should be the only lawless thing in all the universe. Why the same Deity should have created law, and then set Himself up in opposition to it, should have started the wheels to running, and then, every now and then, stuck a mighty finger in, to pry them apart and make them slip a cog, in deference to some later modification of His original plan. It was just about then that I found him. He was floundering in a perfect mire, composed of the dust of conflict mingled with penitential tears. Really, he was knee-deep in the muck; and I put in a good share of my vacation in trying to haul him back to solid ground." Opdyke nodded. "He has told me." "His side, only. Mine was a degree less serious, Reed. Sorry for him as I was, I couldn't help a certain amusement at seeing him get himself into such a mess over nothing. How any person with a fair share of common sense can--Well, I toiled over him, all summer. Talk about mines! I mined in him. I sank new shafts and I dug out new veins, and I presented samples of ore for his inspection. By the end of the summer, I'd got him to where he admitted that a law-abiding God was an improvement on his old, erratic, lawless, irate Deity; that it was treating Him with a long way more respect to endow Him with the attributes of a high-minded gentleman than to consider Him a mere purveyor of red-hot discipline for sins He had specifically created. Then, in the end, I put it squarely up to him: if he must preach at all, why not choose a church that stood for law and order in the universe, a church that, hanging to the old traditions, yet held out her arms to the new interpretations of the law and gospel, instead of sticking to the cast-iron, white-hot Calvinism which hadn't marched an inch, hadn't so much as changed the focus of its spectacles, since the pre-Darwin days of the very first of his ancestral parsons." "Well?" "Well." And Whittenden pulled himself up short. "This is where you begin to come in on the scene, you reprobate. I had just got him on his legs, marching sanely along, to the tune of 'All Thy works shall praise Thy name,' when the doctors came lugging you home into his very parish, laid you down underneath his very nose. No wonder you upset him, completely bowled him over off his theological pins. His God was just and loving and logical, even if a little bit more given to personal interference than any but a Calvinistic God is supposed to be. And here were you, from all accounts a law-abiding citizen--of course the theologian in him failed to take the black powder into account--smitten down in your prime by what he was electing to call the hand of Divine Providence. Of course, it tousled up all the notions I had been stroking down so carefully. He came on a knot--from his own story, I think it was the question as to why a purely innocent Opdyke was chosen as an object of wrathful vengeance. Then he immediately went panicky. That's the erratic strain in him. Up to a certain point, he's logical; then he gets into a seething mass of mismatched syllogisms. In this case, if Providence was good, and you also were good, then Providence wouldn't have knocked you into a cocked hat. No matter now about the sympathy of my phrase; I want you to get the gist of the whole situation. Well, he turned and twisted that around into form AAA, EAE, and so on down the line; and, worse luck, he twisted himself with it till he lost all his point of view, got dizzy, and missed his footing utterly. The original trouble lay in his sheer inability to tally up you and a benign Providence into any proper sort of a sum. Therefore, one of you must be improper and, hence, must be abolished. Therefore, as you were very weighty and manifestly refused to budge, he proceeded to abolish Providence." "Hm. Well." Opdyke spoke thoughtfully. "I begin to see. However, even if I am to blame, I still insist upon it I'm not guilty. Meanwhile, what now?" "Meanwhile, he's become so enamoured of the abolishing process that he's keeping on. Unless we can contrive to break up the habit, in the end he will analyze himself into his original elements, and then abolish those." Reed laughed. Then he said slowly,-- "Poor beggar!" "Yes," Whittenden assented, with sudden gravity; "that is just it. Poor beggar! And now, the worst of it all is that, unless we break it up at once, it will have to run its course, like any other disease." "You call it a disease?" "In his case, I do. Brenton isn't after any working truth to help along the rest of us; he's started hunting the ignis fatuus of abstract verity, provable to its utmost limit. Taken as mental gymnastics, it is doubtless a fine exercise. Taken as a spiritual tonic to a lot of world-tired fellow mortals, I confess I doubt its inherent value." "You told him so?" "In all honour, as an older man inside the same profession, I couldn't do much else." "And he?" "Resented it, exactly as you or I would have resented it, if we had happened to be standing in his spiritual shoes. I couldn't blame him, Reed; and yet I'm sorry." Reed nodded. "I know. Those things always take it out of one. Besides, it's hard lines to help in upsetting your own pedestal. I'm sorry that Brenton took it badly, Whittenden. I didn't think it of him; you have counted so much to him, for years." Whittenden spoke a little sadly. "He thinks that he has outgrown me, Reed; therefore he won't feel the hurt of it, one half so much." Opdyke looked up sharply, a world of comprehension in his brave brown eyes. "But it has hurt you, Whittenden." "Yes," his companion confessed. "It has. It has hit me hard on my besetting sin, Reed, the liking to know that I'm of use to people. And I was of use to Brenton; I'd hoped to keep the old relation to the end; but it's impossible. I found that out, to-day." "It depends on what you call being of use," Opdyke retorted. "You may not have coddled up his Ego, and patacaked his nerves; but there's sometimes a long way more helpfulness in a good thrashing than in all the coddlings since the world began. And Brenton has had an infernal amount of coddling lately; there's no denying that. It's not alone the women; it is sensible men like Doctor Keltridge and my father, men who ought to be filing his teeth, not softening them up with goodies. However, that's as it is. What will be the end of it, do you think?" "Smash; unless you hold him, Reed." "Me? I?" "Yes, you. I don't mean--I'm in earnest now; I hate to see a good man chucking a good profession, and, unless he steadies down, he is bound to chuck it--I don't mean any nonsense about your owing it to him. I mean that you can hold him steady longer than anybody else." "Not you?" Opdyke's accent was incredulous. "My grip on him is gone. In the past, I may have helped him. All I could say, this afternoon, only rubbed him the wrong way, and increased the notion that he's cherishing, the notion that he's an uncomprehended genius. In heaven's name, Reed," and Whittenden's fist came crashing down on the arm of his chair; "is anything in this whole world more hard to fight than that same pose of being misunderstood? Nine times out of ten, it is mere pose. The tenth time, it is mere paranoia, and hence more manageable. No. My hold on Brenton is all gone. As I say, he has outgrown me; I still believe in my immortal soul, and a few such other trifles that no laboratory can prove. To be sure, you believe them, too; but, if you're going to manage Brenton, keep the beliefs tucked out of sight." "Where's my hold on him, then?" Reed queried. Whittenden, bending forward, laid his hand across the rug. "This," he said quietly; and, strange to say, the words brought no sting to Reed Opdyke's mind. Nevertheless, he objected to the fact. "It seems so much like gallery play, Whittenden," he urged. "It's a bit nasty to be making capital out of a thing like that." Whittenden shook his head, as, settling back again, he flung his hand up into the old resting place. "Not if it's given you for just that purpose," he answered then. "No, Reed, hear me out. It never has been your way to dodge responsibilities; in the end, you're sure to buck up against this one, so you may as well take it now as ever. This thing appears to be your present asset. Properly managed, it can bring you no end of influence. Your friends, who really know you, will watch you hanging on to yourself like grim death; and, in time, they'll come to where they'll trust your grip to pull them out of danger, too, when they get to funking. It's an almighty hard job you've got ahead of you, and an endless one; still, knowing you, I know you will put it through and come out of it with your colours flying. Meanwhile," the clear eyes came back to focus; "hang on to Brenton." "If I can." "As long as you can, I mean. The time may come when, like myself, you'll have to let him go. In the mean time, though, he is worth the holding." "Brenton is pure gold," Reed said quietly. "I have known him for many years." But his companion shook his head. "Gold, if you will; but not the purest. There is a dash of alloy we may as well admit, at the start. Else, it will only muddle things, later on. Brenton is good stuff, but a little weak. There's something in him that always will make him stumble and fall down just short of his ideals." "Naturally, being human," Opdyke assented rather dryly. "For that matter, Whittenden, which one of us does not?" But Whittenden made no answer. His hands clasped now at the back of his head, his eyes were resting thoughtfully upon the bright, brave face before him, a thinner face than it had been used to be, more hollow about the temples where the wavy hair clung closely; upon the swaddled figure which, only a year before, had tramped the Colorado mountains, lording it over many men. And now, to the burden of his own that Reed was bearing, he had added the responsibility of watching over Brenton, of guarding Brenton's weakness with his own great strength. Was it just and right to thrust this second burden on to Opdyke? However, self-forgetfulness comes best by focussing all one's energy upon the victim next in line; and Reed Opdyke, just at the present crisis, needed nothing else one half so much as self-forgetfulness. Nevertheless, the pity of it all, the seeming heartlessness, surged in on Whittenden. It would have been far easier for him to have tried to lighten Opdyke's burden than to increase its heaviness. But ease was not the main thing, after all. Suddenly he flung himself forward in his chair, and put his two hands down upon the straight, lean shoulders underneath the rug. "Reed," he said, with an abruptness he did not often show to any one; "if one man ever loved another, it's I with you. For God's sake, then, don't let the time ever come between us when I must stop being of some little use to you, as I've just had to do in the case of Brenton." But, even while he spoke, he knew there was no need for Opdyke's prompt reply,-- "I fancy it never would come to that between the two of us. We've faced too many bad half-hours together. If only I could--" Whittenden understood. He rose, thrust his hands into his pockets, turned away and tramped across the room. "You always have, old man; now more than ever. And, every now and then, we parsons need it, need to be plucked out of our studies and set down face to face with life. It's because I'm owing you so much that I'd like to square up the account a little. Reed, I'm glad you sent for me, no matter if the reason was an ugly one." And then, quite of his own initiative, he went away in search of Ramsdell. All at once there had swept over him the memory of their talk, the night before, and the memory overwhelmed him with its tragedy. _

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