Chapter Thirty

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_ "The thing is amounting to an obsession," Doctor Keltridge told Professor Opdyke testily, two months later. "I never saw a case of such ineradicable dubiousness concerning all the things that do not count." "But the fellow is sincere," the professor urged in extenuation. "Yes; that makes it all so much the worse, as we doctors are aware. It's a species of disease, Opdyke, and when a patient takes his disease seriously, as a general rule it's all up with him. Just how far has Brenton gone?" "From our standpoint, not very far; from the standpoint of the student mind, to the outer limits of agnosticism." The doctor whistled thoughtfully. "What a damn-fool he is, Opdyke!" he remarked, with stress upon the hyphen. "Yes, and no. If I were going to analyze him, I'd write his formula as B₃M+ECo₇, thrice brilliant man plus--and, mind you, the plus is a serious handicap--an embodied conscience raised to the seventh power. Brenton is brilliant; but his mind works in a series of swift flashes, and the flashes dazzle him till they spoil all of his perspective. Instead of taking them for what they are, mere sparks flying from the ends of broken mental contact, he thinks that they are errant gleams of universal truth, vouchsafed to him alone. Then his seven-horse-power conscience goes to work, and bids him scatter the gleams across a darkening world. If he didn't mean so very well, he would do infinitely better. However, he--" "Is Brenton," the doctor interposed quietly. "What is more, he will be Brenton till the end of time. He even may get worse, by way of natural reaction from the strain he was under with his wife. He steadied to that better than I hoped, steadied to the baby's death, and steadied to the reproaches she considerately heaped on him for her parting gift." "Reproaches?" "Yes. She told him that he was to blame for the whole situation; that, if he hadn't run amok, she would be jogging contentedly along the path of ancestral Calvinism. Moreover, the fact that there is more than a grain of truth in her contention doesn't lessen the sting that it has left behind. Now, as a natural consequence, the strain over, he is letting go entirely. He is made like that. Unless we want him to go to pieces utterly, we shall either have to invoke the aid of circumstance, or else bring him up with a round turn, ourselves." "How?" the professor queried flatly. "A man in his position is not amenable to discipline." "I'm not so sure of that." The doctor chuckled. "I am a trustee, you know." "Then he'll resign." "Not a bit of it. He may threaten it, may talk grand and elevated nonsense concerning freedom of speech and all the rest of it. When it comes to resignation, though, he will draw in his horns. His life is in that laboratory of yours." "And in his students?" "No. There's the trouble. It's the idea itself he's after, not its growing grip upon the world at large." "Then what makes him----" The professor paused for the fitting word. The doctor supplied it, and remorselessly. "Explatterate? Because it's a part of him to talk forth his imaginings, and, just at the present hour, he lacks all proper outlet but his class. Something has gone bad inside the man; no wonder, though, when one thinks of all that he has gone through. Even you, Opdyke, will never know the worst of that. Still, we shall have to put some sort of brake upon him; he can't go on like this." For a little while, the professor smoked in silence. "Can't you warn him unofficially, Keltridge?" he asked then. "That he is disgracing the department?" "No. That he is wrecking his final chance to amount to anything that's practical? That, if he holds on here, he must keep within some sort of limits in the things he says? That, if he lets go this present opportunity, he'll turn into the worst of all things, a mental derelict?" The doctor groaned at the suggestion. "Opdyke, I'll be hanged if I'll put in all my time, playing intellectual wet-nurse to Scott Brenton! I've served my turn. If ever he began to cut his wisdom teeth, it's time he was about it." The professor took up the metaphor and cast it back upon the doctor. "A good many babies die of teething," he said. "I've heard you say, yourself, that it was the one time in all a man's life when he was most dependent on the ministrations of the doctor." The doctor rose and straightened up his shoulders. "Fairly caught," he confessed. "Well, I'll do my best. Meanwhile, how is Reed?" "Too busy to think much about himself." "Not overworking?" the doctor questioned sharply. "No. At least, not if his mental condition is any index to his physical. He is eager as a boy over the way his work is coming in. Did I tell you he has an assistant coming, day after to-morrow? Poor little Dennison has been swamped, for two weeks, in the rising tide of things that he knew nothing at all about. I must say he's been heroic in his efforts to help Reed out." The doctor nodded. "Dolph is a good sort. In the last analysis, he is not unlike Reed; they have the same staying power, the same trick of hating to take themselves in earnest. Still, for Reed's sake as well as Dolph's, I'm glad a trained assistant is coming. In fact, I might say I am glad on my own account." "You?" The doctor laughed. "Yes. I've had Dolph at all hours, tearing his hair in my laboratory, while I tried to coach him. I do think, for a boy brought up on belles-lettres, he's made a decent showing as assistant mineralogist. I like Dolph. He's an all-round good fellow." The professor laid aside his pipe; then he looked up keenly. "He's at your house often?" he inquired. The doctor read his old friend like a large-print page. Reading, he straightway became impenetrable. "Yes. He drops in rather often," he assented. "Of course, he knows I am a good deal interested in Reed's new venture. Wonderful, isn't it, the way it has turned out so well? If only Brenton had one quarter of his steady grip!" But, for the present, steady grip was the one thing Brenton lacked. Indeed, watching the recent chaos of his domestic life, one could scarcely wonder. As the doctor had said, reaction was bound to come. It had been no small upsetting, too, the saying farewell to his association with Saint Peter's Parish. The sudden reversal of his collar buttons was, in a sense, typical of the sudden reversal of all his habits of thought and life. His grip had been loosening, during many previous months; the sudden change in his responsibilities appeared to have relaxed it utterly. In the broadest sense, Brenton's old work, like his new, had been teaching. Now, however, the enthusiasm of his gospel was possessing him completely, a gospel, nowadays, solely of the science which, heretofore, threading through and through the fabric of his sermons, had of necessity been juggled to the likeness of the Book of Revelation. Now that he could set it forth in all its nakedness, it seemed to Brenton more than ever like the Book of Revelation. Day after day, his enthusiasm for his theme increased its pace, threw off the bridle of hard, concrete fact, ran to the speculative limits of its course, and then ran past them. By the first of May, Brenton's lectures had made themselves one of the features of the college world; but, by the same token, they had ceased to be lectures upon chemistry, and had become harangues upon every phase of the allied sciences, harangues which ran through the entire gamut of abstract investigation, and came to rest at last upon the pair of finite questions: Whence? and Whither? And, by the first of May, the student world was all agog, seeking to answer those questions flatly and quite off-hand, instead of waiting for experience of life to give the answer for them. Brenton, meantime, was becoming ten times the force he had been at Saint Peter's; the only trouble lay in the fact that now his force was, not formative, but deformative. "He's making himself a reputation, fast enough," Dolph Dennison said, one day. "How much good he is accomplishing, though, is another question." To Dolph's surprise, Olive opposed him. "Isn't there always good in simple, downright sincerity?" she queried. "Not a bit of it," Dolph assured her bluntly, for a certain talk between them, weeks before, a talk disastrous to the best of Dolph's plans for life, had in no sense put an end to their good friendship. "Sincerity itself is nothing. It's the thing one gets sincere about." Then, without waiting for an answer, "What a woman you are, Olive!" he said. "Because I stand up for Mr. Brenton?" "Because, down in your secret heart, you rather admire him for his confounded weaknesses." Dolph spoke with increasing bluntness. "Not for his weaknesses, Dolph. The man is plucky and sincere. For the sake of the things that he believes are true, he will give up, has given up, more than most of us will ever gain." Dolph plunged his fists into his pockets. "Hang it all, Olive! Do be concrete," he bade her. "I will, if I can," she said fearlessly. "It's only that the things themselves aren't too concrete." "No." Dolph spoke incisively. "I should say they aren't. Olive look here. Don't get your values muddled, at this stage of the game." Despite their friendship, she looked up at him haughtily. "What do you mean, Dolph?" For a minute, he stared down at her, smiling slightly and with a look in his eyes that nullified the frank brutality of his next words. "Don't get mawkish over Brenton, Olive, just because he is a pitiful weakling who, in spite of all his good intentions, has made a consistent mess of everything he's tried to do. Because a man is weak, he isn't necessarily more lovable. Because he has an incurable disease, he isn't, of necessity, any more a subject for idolatry. No; I don't mean that to lap over on to Opdyke, either. If ever a man was healthy, Opdyke is that man. But Brenton isn't. His logic and his conscience both are full of bacteria, bad little bacteria that swim around and mess things. He may pull out of it, of course, and make something in the end. Then, you can set him up on a pedestal and stick flowers in his fair hair. For the present, though, do keep sane about him, and deplore him, not admire." "Aren't you a little hard on him, Dolph?" Olive asked steadily, although her cheeks were burning with the truth of his implied accusal. "No; I'm not." There came a short pause. Then,-- "I am very sorry for him," Olive said a little obstinately. "Be sorry, then. Be just as sorry as you can. But, for heaven's sake, don't tell him so," Dolph retorted rather mercilessly. "If he's ever going to amount to anything, he must be brought up with a round turn, not coddled and treated as a victim of untoward circumstance. If he behaves like this over a growing pain in his theology, what do you suppose he'd do in Opdyke's place?" Olive struggled to regain her hauteur. "The cases aren't parallel, Dolph," she said. "One is a physical matter; the other concerns the spirit." Once again Dolph paused and looked down at her intently. Then,-- "Which is which?" he queried. "No; don't get testy, Olive. I'm not producing any brief for Opdyke. In fact, he doesn't need one; we both of us know already what he stands for. But I do hate to see a girl like you go off her head about such a man as Brenton, a man with a Christian Science wife and a thrilling voice and speaking eyes: all deadly assets for a misunderstood ex-preacher. No; I do not like Brenton. He's not my sort. Neither, for the fact of it, is he your sort." Olive compressed her lips. "I may help to make him so," she said. "Best let him make himself; he's had too many formative fingers in his pie, already. Besides," Dolph's lips curled into an irrepressible smile; "how do you know it would be for his advantage?" For one instant, Olive struggled with her pique. Then she cast it off, and looked up at Dolph with her old smile. "You hit hard, Dolph," she told him; "but I'm not sure you aren't in the right of it, after all. I like Mr. Brenton. I am sorry for him; perhaps it has muddled my values, as you call it, to be on the inside circle of his advisers. Still, there is something to be said upon the other side. You can't comprehend a man like Mr. Brenton, if you try." "Why not? Not that I've tried over much, though," Dolph added, in hasty confession. "It wouldn't have done you any good, if you had tried," Olive assured him flatly. "You haven't a single point in common. By ancestry and training, you're as unlike as a Zulu and an Eskimo. You began at about the point where Mr. Brenton, if he's lucky, will leave off. Your great-great-grandparents settled once for all the questions that he's agonizing over now. Naturally, you don't remember their struggles, and so you can't see why his should take it out of him, any more than you can see why a personable man like him ever could have married--" "What your father aptly terms the She-Gargoyle?" Dolph inquired. "No; I can't. But then the question arises promptly, how can you?" Olive smiled a little sadly. Loath though she was to acknowledge it to Dolph, of late she had been finding out that comprehension does not always make for full approval. "As you say, Dolph," she told him; "it's the woman of me. After our own fashion, we every one of us are natural nurses; we know when our menfolk are in pain." "Not always, Olive." Dolph spoke sadly. "Yes, Dolph, we do. Hard as it is, though, sometimes we have to admit we have no cure for that especial pain. Still, you can be quite sure that it isn't easy for us to turn away and leave it, unhealed and aching." Then she threw off the little allegory, and once more spoke with spirit. "Dolph, we're created in mental couples, I suspect. Much as I care for Reed, it was you who had the insight to plan how he could make his life over into something besides the bare existence we all were dreading. In the same way, I may be the one to take in the tragedy of Mr. Brenton's indeterminate existence, and make it just a little lighter, if only by my understanding. Anyway, I mean to try." She turned in across the lawn, leaving Dolph to stare after her retreating figure with no small anxiety. "Blast the understanding!" he said profanely. "And then, blast the preacher!" The poor preacher, however, for preacher still he was, in spite of the reversal of his collar fastenings, was feeling himself already blasted. He had been spending a long hour in the doctor's laboratory; and the doctor, for the once, had turned his back upon his pans and trays of cultures, and lavished his entire attention on his visitor. "It's just here, Brenton," he said quietly, after an hour of argument; "you can do one of two things: you can keep to your text and teach those girls straight chemistry; or--" Brenton faced him squarely, squarely capped the sentence with a single word. "Resign." "Yes." "You mean you think I am a failure in my teaching?" "No. Your teaching is all right. You are a born chemist and a born teacher. It's your infernal preaching I object to," the doctor told him unexpectedly. "My preaching?" "Yes. You employ your pulpit methods in your classes. You take a chemical text, and then turn and twist it into any sort of a metaphysical conclusion that appeals to you at the minute. No; wait! I am talking. Science is not equivocal, Brenton. It's as downright and determinate as A+B. It's what we know; not what we think we ought to think about the things we know. And it's science you are there to teach, not glittering abstractions having to do with man's latter end. The fact is, you've spent so long in trying to subject your theology to scientific proof that, now you're surfeited with science, you are trying to use it as a feeder to your theologic fires." "Not consciously," Brenton objected, as a flush crept up across his cheeks. "I have meant--" The doctor interrupted, but not unkindly. "Consciously or unconsciously, it's all one, Brenton, as concerns the output. You must bridle your scientific imagination and your tongue, or else you'll have the whole college by the ears. For the present, you are letting off harmless rockets. Before you know it, though, you'll be dynamiting the whole establishment. Best go slow." Brenton attempted one last stand. "Have I any right to go slow, doctor, when there's a principle involved? Have I any right to suppress eternal truths--" Then the doctor lost his temper. "Eternal pollywogs!" he burst out. "Man, you're daft. Who told you what truths are eternal? Who told you where science ends, and where theology begins? Who told you what we mean, when we say provable? For two thousand years, and then some more, we have been slowly sifting down a whole mass of ill-assorted beliefs into two great facts: Creator and created. For practical purposes, isn't that all we need to know? Isn't it all that we any of us can grasp: the surety that the Creative Mind would never have taken the trouble to fashion us, in the first place if he hadn't put inside us all the needful germs of progress, all the needful intellect to grasp the evident duty that lies just ahead? What else, then, do you need? No. Don't try to talk about it. Just go out and take a good, long walk in the fresh air, and forget your latter end in the more important concerns of deep breathing. You are getting disgustingly round-shouldered. Good bye. And, by the way, I'll tell Olive you will be back here to dinner." But Brenton, going on his way, was totally oblivious to the doctor's sage counsel as to the merits of deep breathing. Neither did he realize in the least the splendid optimism of the stern old doctor's creed. For the hour, optimism was quite beyond his ken. He only realized that his own world had gone bad; that failure awaited him at every turn, not a downright and practical failure, either, but a nebulous and indeterminate futility. His life had been nothing but one restless struggle to arrive at something finite, something which should satisfy alike his heart and reason. Instead of gaining the one thing, it seemed to him that all had been lost. His present existence was as focusless as an eye after its lens has been extracted. His past had been opaque, his future would be permanently blurred. And for what good had been all the pain? It would have been far better, far more sane, if he had clung stoutly to the flaming horns of his hereditary Calvinism. Infinitely better to feel their scorching touch than to drift into a state of apathy past any feeling! And Brenton wondered vaguely whether he ever would feel anything again, anything, that is, as a personal issue, rather than as a scrap of the great world-plan. Most things, nowadays, left him conscious of being aloof, remote. Even the going away of his wife. Even the death of--He pulled himself up short. Not the baby's death. That was still personal, still very personal; personal was the message of those little waving hands. What did the baby see? Something denied for ever to his adult and doubting eyes? Forgetful of the doctor's invitation to come back to dine, Brenton at twilight found himself upon the long white bridge, his elbows on the rail, his eyes upon the darkening surface of the river, as it swept down upon him from out the purpling hills. As of old, its mystery held him, the mystery of its ceaseless coming, the mystery of its ceaseless going on and on, until it lost all individual existence in the soundless, boundless sea. To-night, in the apathy which held his senses in subjection, he watched it through the dying twilight, until it ceased to be to him a river, but appeared to him as an embodiment of life itself, coming, coming, coming down to him out of the purpling distance, going, going, going down away from him into the deepening shadows. And then the light died, and darkness crept across it all, and then--extinction. Next morning, he arranged it with Professor Opdyke that, for the present, the other assistant should take over all of his lectures, while he himself would put in his time inside the laboratory. _

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