The Inside of the Cup — Complete. Winston Churchill

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СКАЧАТЬ pleasure and displeasure were important; for, since his arrival, he had had delicate reminders of this from many sources. Recurrently, it had caused him a vague uneasiness, hinted at a problem new to him. He was jealous of the dignity of the Church, and he seemed already to have detected in Mr. Parr's manner a subtle note of patronage. Nor could Hodder's years of provincialism permit him to forget that this man with whom he was about to enter into personal relations was a capitalist of national importance.

      The neighbourhood they traversed was characteristic of our rapidly expanding American cities. There were rows of dwelling houses, once ultra-respectable, now slatternly, and lawns gone grey; some of these houses had been remodelled into third-rate shops, or thrown together to make manufacturing establishments: saloons occupied all the favourable corners. Flaming posters on vacant lots announced, pictorially, dubious attractions at the theatres. It was a wonderful Indian summer day, the sunlight soft and melting; and the smoke which continually harassed this district had lifted a little, as though in deference to the Sabbath.

      Hodder read the sign on a lamp post, Dalton Street. The name clung in his memory.

      “We thought, some twenty years ago, of moving the church westward,” said Mr. Parr, “but finally agreed to remain where we were.”

      The rector had a conviction on this point, and did not hesitate to state it without waiting to be enlightened as to the banker's views.

      “It would seem to me a wise decision,” he said, looking out of the window, and wholly absorbed in the contemplation of the evidences of misery and vice, “with this poverty at the very doors of the church.”

      Something in his voice impelled Eldon Parr to shoot a glance at his profile.

      “Poverty is inevitable, Mr. Hodder,” he declared. “The weak always sink.”

      Hodder's reply, whatever it might have been, was prevented by the sudden and unceremonious flight of both occupants toward the ceiling of the limousine, caused by a deep pit in the asphalt.

      “What are you doing, Gratton?” Mr. Parr called sharply through the tube.

      Presently, the lawns began to grow brighter, the houses more cheerful, and the shops were left behind. They crossed the third great transverse artery of the city (not so long ago, Mr. Parr remarked, a quagmire), now lined by hotels and stores with alluring displays in plate glass windows and entered a wide boulevard that stretched westward straight to the great Park. This boulevard the financier recalled as a country road of clay. It was bordered by a vivid strip, of green; a row of tall and graceful lamp posts, like sentinels, marked its course; while the dwellings, set far back on either side, were for the most part large and pretentious, betraying in their many tentative styles of architecture the reaching out of a commercial nation after beauty. Some, indeed, were simple of line and restful to the trained eye.

      They came to the wide entrance of the Park, so wisely preserved as a breathing place for future generations. A slight haze had gathered over the rolling forests to the westward; but this haze was not smoke. Here, in this enchanting region, the autumn sunlight was undiluted gold, the lawns, emerald, and the red gravel around the statesman's statue glistening. The automobile quickly swung into a street that skirted the Park—if street it might be called, for it was more like a generous private driveway—flanked on the right by fences of ornamental ironwork and high shrubbery that concealed the fore yards of dominating private residences which might: without great exaggeration, have been called palaces.

      “That's Ferguson's house,” volunteered Mr. Parr, indicating a marble edifice with countless windows. “He's one of your vestrymen, you know. Ferguson's Department Store.” The banker's eyes twinkled a little for the first time. “You'll probably find it convenient. Most people do. Clever business man, Ferguson.”

      But the rector was finding difficulty in tabulating his impressions.

      They turned in between two posts of a gateway toward a huge house of rough granite. And Hodder wondered whether, in the swift onward roll of things, the time would come when this, too, would have been deemed ephemeral. With its massive walls and heavy, red-tiled roof that sloped steeply to many points, it seemed firmly planted for ages to come. It was surrounded, yet not hemmed in, by trees of a considerable age. His host explained that these had belonged to the original farm of which all this Park Street property had made a part.

      They alighted under a porte-cochere with a glass roof.

      “I'm sorry,” said Mr. Parr, as the doors swung open and he led the way into the house, “I'm sorry I can't give you a more cheerful welcome, but my son and daughter, for their own reasons, see fit to live elsewhere.”

      Hodder's quick ear detected in the tone another cadence, and he glanced at Eldon Parr with a new interest. …

      Presently they stood, face to face, across a table reduced to its smallest proportions, in the tempered light of a vast dining-room, an apartment that seemed to symbolize the fortress-like properties of wealth. The odd thought struck the clergyman that this man had made his own Tower of London, had built with his own hands the prison in which he was to end his days. The carved oaken ceiling, lofty though it was, had the effect of pressing downward, the heavy furniture matched the heavy walls, and even the silent, quick-moving servants had a watchful air.

      Mr. Parr bowed his head while Hodder asked grace. They sat down.

      The constraint which had characterized their conversation continued, yet there was a subtle change in the attitude of the clergyman. The financier felt this, though it could not be said that Hodder appeared more at his ease: his previous silences had been by no means awkward. Eldon Parr liked self-contained men. But his perceptions were as keen as Nelson Langmaid's, and like Langmaid, he had gradually become conscious of a certain baffling personality in the new rector of St. John's. From time to time he was aware of the grey-green eyes curiously fixed on him, and at a loss to account for their expression. He had no thought of reading in it an element of pity. Yet pity was nevertheless in the rector's heart, and its advent was emancipating him from the limitations of provincial inexperience.

      Suddenly, the financier launched forth on a series of shrewd and searching questions about Bremerton, its church, its people, its industries, and social conditions. All of which Hodder answered to his apparent satisfaction.

      Coffee was brought. Hodder pushed back his chair, crossed his knees, and sat perfectly still regarding his host, his body suggesting a repose that did not interfere with his perceptive faculties.

      “You don't smoke, Mr. Hodder?”

      The rector smiled and shook his head. Mr. Parr selected a diminutive, yellow cigar and held it up.

      “This,” he said, “has been the extent of my indulgence for twenty years. They are made for me in Cuba.”

      Hodder smiled again, but said nothing.

      “I have had a letter from your former bishop, speaking of you in the highest terms,” he observed.

      “The bishop is very kind.”

      Mr. Parr cleared his throat.

      “I am considerably older than you,” he went on, “and I have the future of St. John's very much at heart, Mr. Hodder. I trust you will remember this and make allowances for it as I talk to you.

      “I need not remind you that you have a grave responsibility on your shoulders for so young a man, and that St. John's is the oldest parish in the diocese.”

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