The new Catholic church was the largest
and most imposing public building in Octavius.
Even in its unfinished condition, with a bald roofing
of weather-beaten boards marking on the stunted tower
the place where a spire was to begin later on, it
dwarfed every other edifice of the sort in the town,
just as it put them all to shame in the matter of
the throngs it drew, rain or shine, to its services.
These facts had not heretofore been
a source of satisfaction to the Rev. Theron Ware.
He had even alluded to the subject in terms which gave
his wife the impression that he actively deplored
the strength and size of the Catholic denomination
in this new home of theirs, and was troubled in his
mind about Rome generally. But this evening he
walked along the extended side of the big structure,
which occupied nearly half the block, and then, turning
the corner, passed in review its wide-doored, looming
front, without any hostile emotions whatever.
In the gathering dusk it seemed more massive than
ever before, but he found himself only passively considering
the odd statement he had heard that all Catholic Church
property was deeded absolutely in the name of the Bishop
of the diocese.
Only a narrow passage-way separated
the church from the pastorate a fine new
brick residence standing flush upon the street.
Theron mounted the steps, and looked about for a bell-pull.
Search revealed instead a little ivory button set
in a ring of metal work. He picked at this for
a time with his finger-nail, before he made out the
injunction, printed across it, to push. Of course!
how stupid of him! This was one of those electric
bells he had heard so much of, but which had not as
yet made their way to the class of homes he knew.
For custodians of a mediaeval superstition and fanaticism,
the Catholic clergy seemed very much up to date.
This bell made him feel rather more a countryman than
ever.
The door was opened by a tall gaunt
woman, who stood in black relief against the radiance
of the hall-way while Theron, choosing his words with
some diffidence, asked if the Rev. Mr. Forbes was in.
“He is” came the hush-voiced
answer. “He’s at dinner, though.”
It took the young minister a second
or two to bring into association in his mind this
evening hour and this midday meal. Then he began
to say that he would call again it was
nothing special but the woman suddenly
cut him short by throwing the door wide open.
“It’s Mr. Ware, is it
not?” she asked, in a greatly altered tone.
“Sure, he’d not have you go away.
Come inside do, sir! I’ll
tell him.”
Theron, with a dumb show of reluctance,
crossed the threshold. He noted now that the
woman, who had bustled down the hall on her errand,
was gray-haired and incredibly ugly, with a dark sour
face, glowering black eyes, and a twisted mouth.
Then he saw that he was not alone in the hall-way.
Three men and two women, all poorly clad and obviously
working people, were seated in meek silence on a bench
beyond the hat-rack. They glanced up at him for
an instant, then resumed their patient study of the
linoleum pattern on the floor at their feet.
“And will you kindly step in,
sir?” the elderly Gorgon had returned to ask.
She led Mr. Ware along the hall-way to a door near
the end, and opened it for him to pass before her.
He entered a room in which for the
moment he could see nothing but a central glare of
dazzling light beating down from a great shaded lamp
upon a circular patch of white table linen. Inside
this ring of illumination points of fire sparkled
from silver and porcelain, and two bars of burning
crimson tracked across the cloth in reflection from
tall glasses filled with wine. The rest of the
room was vague darkness; but the gloom seemed saturated
with novel aromatic odors, the appetizing scent of
which bore clear relation to what Theron’s blinking
eyes rested upon.
He was able now to discern two figures
at the table, outside the glowing circle of the lamp.
They had both risen, and one came toward him with
cordial celerity, holding out a white plump hand in
greeting. He took this proffered hand rather
limply, not wholly sure in the half-light that this
really was Father Forbes, and began once more that
everlasting apology to which he seemed doomed in the
presence of the priest. It was broken abruptly
off by the other’s protesting laughter.
“My dear Mr. Ware, I beg of
you,” the priest urged, chuckling with hospitable
mirth, “don’t, don’t apologize!
I give you my word, nothing in the world could have
pleased us better than your joining us here tonight.
It was quite dramatic, your coming in as you did.
We were speaking of you at that very moment.
Oh, I forgot let me make you acquainted
with my friend my very particular friend,
Dr. Ledsmar. Let me take your hat; pray draw
up a chair. Maggie will have a place laid for
you in a minute.”
“Oh, I assure you I
couldn’t think of it I’ve just
eaten my my dinner,” expostulated
Theron. He murmured more inarticulate remonstrances
a moment later, when the grim old domestic appeared
with plates, serviette, and tableware for his use,
but she went on spreading them before him as if she
heard nothing. Thus committed against a decent
show of resistance, the young minister did eat a little
here and there of what was set before him, and was
human enough to regret frankly that he could not eat
more. It seemed to him very remarkable cookery,
transfiguring so simple a thing as a steak, for example,
quite out of recognition, and investing the humble
potato with a charm he had never dreamed of.
He wondered from time to time if it would be polite
to ask how the potatoes were cooked, so that he might
tell Alice.
The conversation at the table was
not continuous, or even enlivened. After the
lapses into silence became marked, Theron began to
suspect that his refusal to drink wine had annoyed
them the more so as he had drenched a large
section of table-cloth in his efforts to manipulate
a siphon instead. He was greatly relieved, therefore,
when Father Forbes explained in an incidental way
that Dr. Ledsmar and he customarily ate their meals
almost without a word.
“It’s a philosophic fad
of his,” the priest went on smilingly, “and
I have fallen in with it for the sake of a quiet life;
so that when we do have company that is
to say, once in a blue moon we display no
manners to speak of.”
“I had always supposed that
is, I’ve always heard that it was
more healthful to talk at meals,” said Theron.
“Of course what I mean I
took it for granted all physicians thought so.”
Dr. Ledsmar laughed. “That
depends so much upon the quality of the meals!”
he remarked, holding his glass up to the light.
He seemed a man of middle age and
an equable disposition. Theron, stealing stray
glances at him around the lampshade, saw most distinctly
of all a broad, impressive dome of skull, which, though
obviously the result of baldness, gave the effect
of quite belonging to the face. There were gold-rimmed
spectacles, through which shone now and again the
vivid sparkle of sharp, alert eyes, and there was a
nose of some sort not easy to classify, at once long
and thick. The rest was thin hair and short round
beard, mouse-colored where the light caught them, but
losing their outlines in the shadows of the background.
Theron had not heard of him among the physicians of
Octavius. He wondered if he might not be a doctor
of something else than medicine, and decided upon venturing
the question.
“Oh, yes, it is medicine,”
replied Ledsmar. “I am a doctor three or
four times over, so far as parchments can make one.
In some other respects, though, I should think I am
probably less of a doctor than anybody else now living.
I haven’t practised that is, regularly for
many years, and I take no interest whatever in keeping
abreast of what the profession regards as its progress.
I know nothing beyond what was being taught in the
sixties, and that I am glad to say I have mostly forgotten.”
“Dear me!” said Theron.
“I had always supposed that Science was the most
engrossing of pursuits that once a man took
it up he never left it.”
“But that would imply a connection
between Science and Medicine!” commented the
doctor. “My dear sir, they are not even
on speaking terms.”
“Shall we go upstairs?”
put in the priest, rising from his chair. “It
will be more comfortable to have our coffee there unless
indeed, Mr. Ware, tobacco is unpleasant to you?”
“Oh, my, no!” the young
minister exclaimed, eager to free himself from the
suggestion of being a kill-joy. “I don’t
smoke myself; but I am very fond of the odor, I assure
you.”
Father Forbes led the way out.
It could be seen now that he wore a long house-gown
of black silk, skilfully moulded to his erect, shapely,
and rounded form. Though he carried this with
the natural grace of a proud and beautiful belle,
there was no hint of the feminine in his bearing,
or in the contour of his pale, firm-set, handsome face.
As he moved through the hall-way, the five people
whom Theron had seen waiting rose from their bench,
and two of the women began in humble murmurs, “If
you please, Father,” and “Good-evening
to your Riverence;” but the priest merely nodded
and passed on up the staircase, followed by his guests.
The people sat down on their bench again.
A few minutes later, reclining at
his ease in a huge low chair, and feeling himself
unaccountably at home in the most luxuriously appointed
and delightful little room he had ever seen, the Rev.
Theron Ware sipped his unaccustomed coffee and embarked
upon an explanation of his errand. Somehow the
very profusion of scholarly symbols about him the
great dark rows of encased and crowded book-shelves
rising to the ceiling, the classical engravings upon
the wall, the revolving book-case, the reading-stand,
the mass of littered magazines, reviews, and papers
at either end of the costly and elaborate writing-desk seemed
to make it the easier for him to explain without reproach
that he needed information about Abram. He told
them quite in detail the story of his book.
The two others sat watching him through
a faint haze of scented smoke, with polite encouragement
on their faces. Father Forbes took the added
trouble to nod understandingly at the various points
of the narrative, and when it was finished gave one
of his little approving chuckles.
“This skirts very closely upon
sorcery,” he said smilingly. “Do
you know, there is perhaps not another man in the country
who knows Assyriology so thoroughly as our friend
here, Dr. Ledsmar.”
“That’s putting it too
strong,” remarked the Doctor. “I only
follow at a distance a year or two behind.
But I daresay I can help you. You are quite welcome
to anything I have: my books cover the ground
pretty well up to last year. Delitzsch is very
interesting; but Baudissin’s ’Studien
zur Semitischen Religionsgeschichte’ would
come closer to what you need. There are several
other important Germans Schrader, Bunsen,
Duncker, Hommel, and so on.”
“Unluckily I I don’t
read German readily,” Theron explained with
diffidence.
“That’s a pity,”
said the doctor, “because they do the best work not
only in this field, but in most others. And they
do so much that the mass defies translation.
Well, the best thing outside of German of course is
Sayce. I daresay you know him, though.”
The Rev. Mr. Ware shook his head mournfully.
“I don’t seem to know any one,”
he murmured.
The others exchanged glances.
“But if I may ask, Mr. Ware,”
pursued the doctor, regarding their guest with interest
through his spectacles, “why do you specially
hit upon Abraham? He is full of difficulties enough,
just now, at any rate, to warn off the bravest scholar.
Why not take something easier?”
Theron had recovered something of
his confidence. “Oh, no,” he said,
“that is just what attracts me to Abraham.
I like the complexities and contradictions in his
character. Take for instance all that strange
and picturesque episode of Hagar: see the splendid
contrast between the craft and commercial guile of
his dealings in Egypt and with Abimelech, and the
simple, straightforward godliness of his later years.
No, all those difficulties only attract me. Do
you happen to know of course you would
know do those German books, or the others,
give anywhere any additional details of the man himself
and his sayings and doings little things
which help, you know, to round out one’s conception
of the individual?”
Again the priest and the doctor stole
a furtive glance across the young minister’s
head. It was Father Forbes who replied.
“I fear that you are taking
our friend Abraham too literally, Mr. Ware,”
he said, in that gentle semblance of paternal tones
which seemed to go so well with his gown. “Modern
research, you know, quite wipes him out of existence
as an individual. The word ‘Abram’
is merely an eponym it means ‘exalted
father.’ Practically all the names in the
Genesis chronologies are what we call eponymous.
Abram is not a person at all: he is a tribe,
a sept, a clan. In the same way, Shem is not intended
for a man; it is the name of a great division of the
human race. Heber is simply the throwing back
into allegorical substance, so to speak, of the Hebrews;
Heth of the Hittites; Asshur of Assyria.”
“But this is something very
new, this theory, isn’t it?” queried Theron.
The priest smiled and shook his head.
“Bless you, no! My dear sir, there is nothing
new. Epicurus and Lucretius outlined the whole
Darwinian theory more than two thousand years ago.
As for this eponym thing, why Saint Augustine called
attention to it fifteen hundred years ago. In
his ‘De Civitate Dei,’ he expressly
says of these genealogical names, ‘Gentes
non HOMINES;’ that is, ‘peoples, not
persons.’ It was as obvious to him as
much a commonplace of knowledge as it was
to Ezekiel eight hundred years before him.”
“It seems passing strange that
we should not know it now, then,” commented
Theron; “I mean, that everybody shouldn’t
know it.”
Father Forbes gave a little purring
chuckle. “Ah, there we get upon contentious
ground,” he remarked. “Why should
‘everybody’ be supposed to know anything
at all? What business is it of ‘everybody’s’
to know things? The earth was just as round in
the days when people supposed it to be flat, as it
is now. So the truth remains always the truth,
even though you give a charter to ten hundred thousand
separate numskulls to examine it by the light of their
private judgment, and report that it is as many different
varieties of something else. But of course that
whole question of private judgment versus authority
is No-Man’s-Land for us. We were speaking
of eponyms.”
“Yes,” said Theron; “it is very
interesting.”
“There is a curious phase of
the subject which hasn’t been worked out much,”
continued the priest. “Probably the Germans
will get at that too, sometime. They are doing
the best Irish work in other fields, as it is.
I spoke of Heber and Heth, in Genesis, as meaning the
Hebrews and the Hittites. Now my own people,
the Irish, have far more ancient legends and traditions
than any other nation west of Athens; and you find
in their myth of the Milesian invasion and conquest
two principal leaders called Heber and Ith, or Heth.
That is supposed to be comparatively modern about
the time of Solomon’s Temple. But these
independent Irish myths go back to the fall of the
Tower of Babel, and they have there an ancestor, grandson
of Japhet, named Fenius Farsa, and they ascribe
to him the invention of the alphabet. They took
their ancient name of Feine, the modern Fenian, from
him. Oddly enough, that is the name which the
Romans knew the Phoenicians by, and to them also is
ascribed the invention of the alphabet. The Irish
have a holy salmon of knowledge, just like the Chaldean
man-fish. The Druids’ tree-worship is identical
with that of the Chaldeans those pagan groves,
you know, which the Jews were always being punished
for building. You see, there is nothing new.
Everything is built on the ruins of something else.
Just as the material earth is made up of countless
billions of dead men’s bones, so the mental
world is all alive with the ghosts of dead men’s
thoughts and beliefs, the wraiths of dead races’
faiths and imaginings.”
Father Forbes paused, then added with
a twinkle in his eye: “That peroration
is from an old sermon of mine, in the days when I used
to preach. I remember rather liking it, at the
time.”
“But you still preach?”
asked the Rev. Mr. Ware, with lifted brows.
“No! no more! I only talk
now and again,” answered the priest, with what
seemed a suggestion of curtness. He made haste
to take the conversation back again. “The
names of these dead-and-gone things are singularly
pertinacious, though. They survive indefinitely.
Take the modern name Marmaduke, for example.
It strikes one as peculiarly modern, up-to-date, doesn’t
it? Well, it is the oldest name on earth thousands
of years older than Adam. It is the ancient Chaldean
Meridug, or Merodach. He was the young god who
interceded continually between the angry, omnipotent
Ea, his father, and the humble and unhappy Damkina,
or Earth, who was his mother. This is interesting
from another point of view, because this Merodach
or Marmaduke is, so far as we can see now, the original
prototype of our ‘divine intermediary’
idea. I daresay, though, that if we could go
back still other scores of centuries, we should find
whole receding series of types of this Christ-myth
of ours.”
Theron Ware sat upright at the fall
of these words, and flung a swift, startled look about
the room the instinctive glance of a man
unexpectedly confronted with peril, and casting desperately
about for means of defence and escape. For the
instant his mind was aflame with this vivid impression that
he was among sinister enemies, at the mercy of criminals.
He half rose under the impelling stress of this feeling,
with the sweat standing on his brow, and his jaw dropped
in a scared and bewildered stare.
Then, quite as suddenly, the sense
of shock was gone; and it was as if nothing at all
had happened. He drew a long breath, took another
sip of his coffee, and found himself all at once reflecting
almost pleasurably upon the charm of contact with
really educated people. He leaned back in the
big chair again, and smiled to show these men of the
world how much at his ease he was. It required
an effort, he discovered, but he made it bravely,
and hoped he was succeeding.
“It hasn’t been in my
power to at all lay hold of what the world keeps on
learning nowadays about its babyhood,” he said.
“All I have done is to try to preserve an open
mind, and to maintain my faith that the more we know,
the nearer we shall approach the Throne.”
Dr. Ledsmar abruptly scuffled his
feet on the floor, and took out his watch. “I’m
afraid ” he began.
“No, no! There’s
plenty of time,” remarked the priest, with his
soft half-smile and purring tones. “You
finish your cigar here with Mr. Ware, and excuse me
while I run down and get rid of the people in the hall.”
Father Forbes tossed his cigar-end
into the fender. Then he took from the mantel
a strange three-cornered black-velvet cap, with a dangling
silk tassel at the side, put it on his head, and went
out.
Theron, being left alone with the
doctor, hardly knew what to do or say. He took
up a paper from the floor beside him, but realized
that it would be impolite to go farther, and laid
it on his knee. Some trace of that earlier momentary
feeling that he was in hostile hands came back, and
worried him. He lifted himself upright in the
chair, and then became conscious that what really
disturbed him was the fact that Dr. Ledsmar had turned
in his seat, crossed his legs, and was contemplating
him with a gravely concentrated scrutiny through his
spectacles.
This uncomfortable gaze kept itself
up a long way beyond the point of good manners; but
the doctor seemed not to mind that at all.