Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson
Phases of an Inferior Planet
CHAPTER III
Father Algarcife withdrew the latch-key from the outer door and stopped in the hall to remove his hat and coat. He had just returned from a meeting of the wardens, called to discuss the finances of the church.
"Agnes!" he said.
A woman came from the dining-room at the end of the hall, and, taking his coat from his hands, hung it upon the rack. She was stout and middle-aged, with a face like a full-blown dahlia beneath her cap of frilled muslin. She had been house-keeper and upper servant to Father Speares, and had descended to his successor as a matter of course.
"Have there been any callers, Agnes?"
"Only two, sir. One of the sisters, who left word that she would return in the evening, and that same woman from Elizabeth Street, who wanted you to take charge of her husband who was drunk. I told her a policeman could manage him better, and she said she hadn't thought of that. She went to find one."
"Thank you, Agnes," replied Father Algarcife, with a laugh. "A policeman could manage him much better."
"So any fool might have known, sir; but those poor creatures seem kind of crazy. I believe they get you twisted with the Creator. They'll be asking you to bring back the dead next. Will you have dinner at eight?"
"Yes, at eight."
He passed into his study, closing the door after him. A shaggy little cur, lying on the hearth-rug, jumped up at his entrance, and came towards him, his tail cutting semicircles in the air.
"How are you, Comrade?" said the man, cheerfully. He bent over, running his fingers along the rough, yellow body of the dog. It was a vagrant that he had rescued from beneath a cable-car and brought home in his arms. His care had met its reward in gratitude, and the bond between them was perhaps the single emotion remaining in either life.
The room was small, and furnished in a manner that suggested luxurious comfort. It had been left thus by Father Speares, and the younger man, moved by a sense of loyalty, had guarded it unchanged. Over the high mantel one of Father Speares's ancestors looked down from a massive frame, and upon the top of the book-shelves lining the four walls there was the marble bust of another. Heavy curtains of russet-brown fell from the windows, and a portière of the same material hung across the door. In the centre of the room, where the light fell full upon it while it was yet day, there was a quaint old desk of hand-carved mahogany. On the lid, covered by a white blotter, lay a number of unanswered letters, containing appeals for charities, the manuscript of an unfinished sermon, and the small black-velvet case in which the sermon would be placed upon its completion. In the open grate a fire burned brightly, and a table bearing an unlighted lamp was drawn into the glow.
The dog, trembling with welcome, curled upon the rug, and Father Algarcife, throwing himself into the easy-chair beside the table, stretched his hands towards the blaze. They were thin and virile hands, and the firelight, shining behind them, threw into relief the lines crossing and recrossing the palms, giving to them the look of hieroglyphics on old parchment. His face, across which the flickering shadows chased, assumed the effect of a drawing in strong black and white.
Before the intense heat of the grate, a languor crept over him, a sensation of comfort inspired by the firelight, the warmth, and the welcome of the fellow-mortal at his feet. Half yawning, his head fell back against the cushion of the chair and his thoughts stirred drowsily.
He thought of the ruddy reflection dancing on the carving of the desk, of the text of the unfinished sermon, of a pamphlet on the table beside the unlighted lamp, and of a letter to his lawyer that remained unwritten. Then he thought of Mrs. Ryder in her full and unsatisfied beauty, and then of a woman in his congregation who had given a thurible of gold to the church, and then of one of the members of the sisterhood. He wondered if it were Sister Agatha who had called, and if she wished to consult him about the home of which she had charge. He feared that the accommodations were too crowded, and questioned if the state of the finances justified moving into larger quarters. In the same connection, he remembered that he had intended mentioning to the sacristan the insufficient heating of the church during services. From this he passed suddenly to the memory of the face of the woman who had died of cancer that morning. He recalled the dirt and poverty and the whimpering of the blear-eyed child with the chronic cold.
"What a life!" he said, and he glanced about the luxurious room calmly, half disdainfully. His eyes fell on the arm of the sofa which was slightly worn as if from friction, and he remembered that he never used it, and that it was the one on which Father Speares had been accustomed to take his daily nap. He shivered faintly, brushed by that near association with the dead which trivialities invoke.
It seemed but yesterday, that morning eight years ago, when he had fainted in the crowded square. He could close his eyes now and review each detail with the dispassionateness of indifference. He could see the flaming blue of the sky, the statue of Horace Greeley across the way, and the confused blur of the bulletin-board before the World building. He could hear the incessant falling of the water in the fountain, and he could feel the old sensation of nausea that had blotted out the consciousness of place. He remembered the long convalescence from the fever that had followed – the trembling of his limbs when he moved and the weakness of his voice when he spoke – the utter vanquishment of his power of volition. He reviewed, almost methodically, that collapse into black despair and the mental and emotional stagnation that had covered all the crawling years. The fever, mounting to his brain, had left it seared of energy and had sapped the passion in his blood. It had consumed his old loves, with his old ambitions, and had left his emotions as sterile as his mind.
He remembered the struggle that had come, his resistance and his defeat, and he saw the joy in the older man's eyes when he had laid before him the remainder of his life – when he had said, "I no longer care. Make of me what you will."
The other had answered, "I will not take the sacrifice without sincerity or without the will of God."
"It is no sacrifice," he had replied. "It is a debt. If I can believe, I will."
And he had felt the words as a man half drugged by ether feels the first incision of the knife.
But he had not believed. Sitting now in his clerical dress, before the fire kindled by his ordination, he knew that it was his weakness, not his will, that had bent. Whether the motive was gratitude or despair he did not question. There had been a debt, and he had met it by the bond of flesh and blood. Yes, he had repaid it in full.
From the moment when he had been called into Father Speares's place he had striven untiringly to do honor to the dead. He had spared neither himself nor others. He had toiled night and day, as a man toils who loves a cause – or is mad. Though his heart was not in the work, his will was, and he was goaded to it by the knowledge that his intellect revolted. Because the life was loathsome to him he left not one detail unperformed. He had given a bond, and he fulfilled it, though his bond was a lie.
He lifted his head impatiently and looked before him. Then he smiled, half bitterly, in the flickering firelight. Across the drawn curtains at the window he could see the almost indistinguishable forms of people passing in the street. He felt suddenly that his whole existence was filled with such vague outlines, surrounded by gray dusk. The only thing that was real was the lie.
That was with him always, at every instant of the day. It lay in his coat, in his clothes, in his very necktie. It filled the book-shelves in the room and covered the closely written sheets upon his desk. It was in the cope and in the chasuble, in the paten and in the chalice, in the censer and in the Creed. Yes; he had sworn his faith to a myth, and had said "I believe – " to a fable.
The words of the Creed that he had chanted the day before rang suddenly in his ears:
"And in our Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God – "
What if he had lived a lie decently, what if he had fought a good fight for a cause he opposed, what if he, in the name of that cause, had closed his eyes and his nostrils to the things that repel and had labored to cleanse the sewer at his door, was it any the less a lie?
"Father, dinner is served."
He raised himself and stood upon the hearth-rug. The dog awoke and circled about his feet. Then together they passed into the dining-room.
For a moment he stood before his chair, silently making the sign of the cross. Then he sat down and unfolded his napkin. It was a simple meal, and he ate it in silence. When the soup was finished and the meat brought on, he cut up a portion for the dog at his side, placing the plate upon the floor. Then he pushed his own plate away, and sat looking into his glass of claret as it sparkled in the light.
The bell rang, and the maid went to answer it. In a moment she came back.
"It is the sister," she said. "She is in your study."
"Very well," Father Algarcife responded.
He laid his napkin upon the table and passed out.
CHAPTER IV
Jerome Ardly turned into one of the entrances leading to the Holbein studios, ascended the long flight of stairs, and paused before a door bearing a brass plate, on which was engraved
CLAUDE NEVINS
As the knocker fell beneath his touch the door swung open, revealing Nevins in a velvet smoking-jacket rather the worse for wear, his flaxen hair standing on end above his wrinkled brow.
"Hello!" was his greeting, taking the end of a camel's-hair brush from his mouth. "So you've turned up at last. I've been doing your dirty work all the morning."
Ardly entered with a swing, closing the door after him. He had grown handsomer in the last eight years, though the world had gone less well with him than with Nevins. His large brown eyes still held their old recklessness, and there had come into his voice a constant ring of bravado.
"Plenty for us both," he responded, blandly, throwing his hat on the divan and himself into a chair. "My hand hath found its share to do, and I have done it with all my might. I've been interviewing a lot of voters in the old Ninth Ward. If Tammany doesn't make a clean sweep of that district I'm a – a fool."
"I wish you were not. Then you wouldn't be polling round these confounded politicians. It seems to me your own district is more than you can manage, but somehow you seem to be attending to everybody else's. What under heaven does any self-respecting man want to be alderman for, anyway? I wouldn't look at it."
"My dear fellow, view it as a stepping-stone to greater glory."
"A deuced long step downward."
Ardly laughed, then, stretching himself, looked idly at the opening in the ceiling through which the daylight fell. It framed a square of blue sky across which a stray cloud drifted.
The room was large and oblong, and the atmosphere was heavy with the odors of oil and turpentine. The furniture consisted of a number of covered easels, several coarse hangings ornamented in bizarre designs, and a divan surmounted by an Oriental canopy. Over the door there was a row of death-masks in plaster, relieved against a strip of ebony, and from a pedestal in one corner a bust of Antinous smiled the world-worn smile of all the ages.
"Temper seems soured," remarked Ardly, raising himself and turning to survey Nevins. "What's up?"
Nevins smiled mysteriously, then waxed communicative.
"Saw Algarcife to-day," he said, carelessly.
"Oh! What did he say for himself?"
Nevins laughed.
"Does he ever say anything?" he demanded. "I asked him what he thought of the elections, and he replied that they did not come within the sphere of his profession."
Ardly grinned.
"Guess not," he ejaculated. "Was that all?"
"Oh, the rest was about as follows: I went to his house, you know, and told him I wanted his spiritual certificate as to your modesty and worth. I also observed that the newspapers had undertaken to throw moral search-lights indiscriminately around – "
"What did he say to that?" chuckled Ardly.
"He: 'Ardly can sustain them, I suppose.'
"I: 'Don't know, I'm sure. Would like to have your opinion.'
"He: 'It seems to me that you are in a better position to pass judgment on that point than I am.'
"I: 'But the standards are not the same, father.' (That 'father' ripped out as pat as possible.)
"He (rather bored): 'Oh, he is a fine fellow. I wish there were more like him.'"
"He is a fine fellow himself," retorted Ardly, loyally.
Nevins examined his brushes complacently. "If I were a Tammanyite," he said, "I'd post his certificate in the districts lying off the Bowery."
"It would be a shame," returned Ardly. Then he smiled. "By Jove! I believe if those districts knew Algarcife favored the little finger of a candidate, they would swallow the whole Tammany ticket."
"Queer influence, isn't it?"
"Well, I don't know. He works night and day over these people – and he knows how to deal with them. Leave it to the Bowery or to the ladies in his congregation, and he might turn this government into a despotism without a single dissenting vote."
"I believe you're right. By the way, you know he gave me that portrait of Father Speares to do for the church."
"Glad to hear it. But I never understood his conversion, somehow."
"Oh, I don't know. Men change like that every day."
"But not for logic. I say, it happened shortly after Mariana left, didn't it?"
"I think so."
"Heard anything of her?"
Nevins shook his head.
"Only what you know already," he answered.
"Deuced little, then."
"She came back, you know that, and went out West for a divorce. Then she married an ass of an Englishman, named the Honorable Cecil somebody."
"Good Lord! You've known that all these years?"
"Pretty nearly."
"Why in the devil didn't you tell me before?"
Nevins shrugged his shoulders. "My dear fellow, I don't feel the necessity to confide to you the secrets of my bosom."
"I call that a sneak."
"Why couldn't you find it out for yourself?"
"Because I don't go round diving into other people's affairs."
"Neither do I," responded Nevins, with dignity.
"How did you know, then?"
"It just came to me."
"Humph!" retorted Ardly, suspiciously.
Nevins squeezed a trifle of white-lead on his palette. Then he rose and drew the cord attached to the shade beneath the skylight. After which he stood to one side, studying the canvas with half-closed eyes, and shaking his dissatisfied head. As he returned to his seat he brushed the mouth of a tube of paint with his trousers, and swore softly. At last he spoke.
"I know something else," he volunteered, cautiously.
"About Mariana?"
"Yes."
"Let's have it, man."
Nevins laid his palette aside, and, seating himself astride the back of a chair, surveyed Ardly impressively.
"I can't see that there is any use," he remarked.
Ardly threw the end of a cigar at him and squared up wrathfully. "Are you a damned fool or a utilitarian?" he demanded.
"She left the Honorable somebody," said Nevins, slowly.
"By Jove! what a woman!"
"She came to America."
"You don't say so!"
"She is in New York."
"What!"
Ardly left his chair and straightened himself against the mantel.
"How do you know?" he asked.
"I have seen her."
"Seen her!"
"Her photograph," concluded Nevins, suavely.
"Where?"
"In Ponsonby's show-case, on Fifth Avenue, near Thirtieth Street."
"How do you know it is she?"
"Well, I'll be damned! Don't I know Mariana?"
"Is it like her?"
"It is a gem; but you know she always photographed well. She knew how to pose."
"Has she changed?"
"Fatter, a trifle; fairer, a trifle; better groomed, a great deal – older and graver, I fancy."
"Well, I never!" said Ardly, and he whistled a street song between half-closed lips.
Nevins spoke again.
"She is a kind of rage with a lot of club-men," he said, "but the women haven't taken her up. I heard Mrs. Ryder call her an adventuress. But Layton told me Ryder was mad about her."
"Queer creatures, women," said Ardly. "They have a margin of morality, and a woman's virtue is determined by its difference in degree from the lowest stage worth cultivating. They imagine her not worth cultivating, I suppose."
"Oh, Mariana is all right," rejoined Nevins. Then he went on, reflectively: "Odd thing about it is her reputation for beauty. Judge her calmly, and she isn't even pretty."
"But who could judge her calmly?" responded Ardly. He picked up his hat and moved towards the door. "Well, I'll be off," he said.
"To the club?"
"No, just a little stroll down the avenue."
Nevins smiled broadly.
"Don't forget that Ponsonby's window-case is on the avenue," he remarked, placidly.
"Oh; so it is!"
Ardly went out into the crisp sunshine, a rising glow in his face. He walked briskly, with an almost impatient buoyancy. Near Thirtieth Street he stopped before the window-case and looked in.
From a square of gray card-board Mariana smiled at him, the aureole of her hair defined against a dark background. For a moment he stared blankly, and then an expression of hunger crept into his eyes – the hunger of one who has never been satisfied.
She was fairer, older, graver, as Nevins had said. There was a wistful droop in her pose, and in the splendor of her half-closed eyes there was something the old Mariana had never known – something left by the gathering of experience and the memory of tears.
He turned abruptly away, his face darkening and the buoyancy failing his step. He knew suddenly that the world was very stale and flat, and politics unprofitable. He crossed to Broadway and a few blocks farther down met Father Algarcife, who stopped him.
"Nevins was talking to me about you this morning," he said. "And so you are taking the matter seriously."
"As seriously as one takes – castor-oil."
The other smiled.
"Why, I thought you liked the chase."
"Like it! My dear sir, life is not exactly a question of one's likes or dislikes."
Father Algarcife looked at him with intentness.
"What! has not the world served you well?" he asked.
Ardly laughed.
"As well as a flute serves a man who doesn't know how to play it," he answered. "I am a master of discords."
"And so journalism didn't fit you?"
"Oh, journalism led to this. I did the chief a good turn or two, and he doesn't forget."
"I see," said Father Algarcife. Then he laughed. "And here is the other side," he added. Across the street before them hung a flaunting banner of white bunting, ornamented in red letters. Half mechanically his eyes followed the words:
SAMUEL J. SLOANE SAYS,
If I am elected Mayor, the government of New York will be conducted upon the highest plane of
EFFICIENCY! JUSTICE! AND RIGHT!
The wind caught the bunting and it swelled out as if inflated by the pledges it bore.
Ardly laughed cynically.
"I wish he'd drop a few hints to Providence," he remarked. "It is certainly a plane upon which the universe has never been conducted."
Father Algarcife walked on in silence, making his way along the crowded street with a slow yet determined step. The people who knew him turned to look after him, and those who did not stepped from before his way, moved by the virile dignity in his carriage, which suggested a man possessed by an absorbing motive.
Ardly looked a little abashed, and laughed half apologetically.
"I have been in harness all my life," he said, "and now I'm doing a little kicking against the traces."
A boyish humor rushed to the other's lips.
"In that case, I can make but one recommendation," he replied: "if you kick against the traces – kick hard."
He drew out his watch and paused a moment as if in doubt.
"Yes, I'll go to the hospital," he said; "there is a half-hour before luncheon," and he turned into East Twentieth Street on his way to Second Avenue. When he reached the hospital, he entered the elevator upon the first floor and ascended to the babies' ward. As he stepped upon the landing, a calm-faced nurse in a fresh uniform passed him, holding a glass of milk in her white, capable hand.
His eyes brightened as he saw her, and under the serene system of the place he felt a sense of restfulness steal over him like warmth.
"How is my charge?" he asked.
A ripple of tenderness crossed the nurse's lips as she answered:
"He has been looking for you, and he is always better on the days that you come."
She passed along the hall and entered a large room into which the daylight fell like a bath of sunshine. In the centre of the room there was a tiny table around which a dozen children were sitting in small white chairs. Despite the bandaged heads and the weak limbs, there was no sign of suffering. It was all cheerfulness and sunshine, as if the transition from a tenement-house room to space and air had unfolded the shrunken little bodies into bloom.
In a cot near a window, where the sunlight flashed across the cover, a boy of three or four years lay with a strap beneath his small pink wrapper, fastening him to a board of wood. At the head of the bed was printed the name, and below:
"Pott's disease of the spine.
Received, October, 1896; discharged …"
As he saw the priest he stretched out his pallid little hands with a gurgle of welcome, merriment overflowing his eyes.
Father Algarcife took the hands in his and sat down beside the cot. Since entering the room he seemed to have caught something of the infant stoicism surrounding him, for his face had lost its strained pallor and the lines about his mouth had softened.
"So it is a good day," he said. "The little man is better. He has been on the roof-garden."
The child laughed.
"It ith a good day," he made answer. "There ith the woof-garden and there ith ithe-cream."
"And which is the best?"
"Bofe," said the child.
"That's right, little soldier; and what did you do in the garden?"
The child clapped his hands.
"I played," he responded; "an' I'm goin' to play ball on my legs when I mend."
One of the nurses came and stood for a moment at the foot of the bed. "He has learned a hymn for you," she said. "He is teaching the other children to sing – aren't you, baby?"
"Yeth."
"And you'll sing for the father?"
The child's mouth quivered with pleasure and his eyes gleamed. Then his gay little voice rang out in a shrill treble:
"Yeth, Jesuth lovths me,
Yeth, Jesuth lovths me,
Yeth, Jesuth lovths me,
The Bible tells me so."
He ended with a triumphant little gasp and lay smiling at the sunshine.
A quarter of an hour later Father Algarcife returned to the street. It was Friday, and at two o'clock he was to be in the sacristy, where it was his custom to receive the members of his parish. It was the most irksome of his duties, and he fulfilled it with a repugnance that had not lessened with time. Now it represented even a greater strain than usual. He had been soothed by his visit to the hospital, and he dreaded the friction of the next few hours – the useless advice delivered, the trivialities responded to, the endless details of fashionable foibles that would be heard. He wondered, resentfully, if there were not some means by which this office might be abolished or delivered into the hands of an assistant. Then his eyes shot humor as he imagined Miss Vernish, Mrs. Ryder, or a dozen others consenting to receive spiritual instruction from a lesser priest with a snub-nose.
As he passed a book-shop in Union Square, a man reading the posters upon the outside attracted his notice.
"Oh, I say, Mr. Algarcife!"
He stopped abruptly, recognized the speaker, and nodded.
The other went on with a heated rush of words.
"Those are fine things of yours, those sermons. I congratulate you."
"Thank you."
"Yes, they are fine. But, I say, you got the better of the Scientific Weekly writer. It was good."
"I don't know," responded Father Algarcife. "It is a good deal in the way you look at it, I suppose."
"Not at all. I am not prejudiced – not in the least – never knew anybody less so. But he isn't your equal in controversy, by a long shot."
A sudden boyish laugh broke from Father Algarcife – a laugh wrung from him by the pressure of an overwhelming sense of humor. "I don't think it is a question of equality," he replied, "but of points of view."
