Phases of an Inferior Planet

With the instinct for solitude, he started and rose to move onward, when he saw that the earth was undulating beneath his feet and that the atmosphere was filled with fog. The dome of the World building reeled suddenly and clashed into the flaming sky. He heard the sound of brazen-tongued bells ringing higher and higher above the falling of the water, above the tread of passing feet, and above the dull, insistent din of the traffic in the streets.

Then his name was called and he felt a hand upon his arm.

"Why, Anthony!"

He looked up bewildered, but straightened himself and stood erect, straining at the consciousness that was escaping him.

"How are you, Mr. Speares?" he asked. His voice was without inflection.

Father Speares spoke with impassioned pity. "What are you doing? You are ill – a ghost – "

Algarcife steadied himself against the bench and said nothing.

"What does it mean? Your wife – where is she?"

Anthony's voice came slowly and without emotion. "I am alone," he answered.

A quick moisture sprang to the older man's eyes. He held out his hand. "Come with me," he said, fervently. "I am alone also. Come to my house."

Algarcife left the bench and took a step from him.

"No," he replied. "I – I am all right."

Then he staggered and would have fallen but for the other's sustaining arm.

Phase Second

"And not even here do all agree – no, not any one with himself."

– Marcus Aurelius. (Long.)

CHAPTER I

Two men passed the Church of the Immaculate Conception, wheeled suddenly round, and came back.

"By Jove, Driscoll, you have been outside of civilization!" said one, who was fair and florid, with a general suggestion of potential apoplexy polished by the oil of indulgence. "What! you haven't heard the Reverend Algarcife? Why, he rivals in popularity the Brockenhurst scandal, and his power is only equalled by that of – of Tammany."

John Driscoll laughed cynically.

"Let's have the scandal, by all means," he returned. "Spare me the puling priests."

"Bless my soul, man, don't tell me the Brockenhurst affair hasn't reached the Pacific slope! What a hell of a place! Well, Darbey was named corespondent, you know. You remember Darbey, the fellow who owned that dandy racer, La Bella, and lost her to Owens at cards? But the papers are full of it. Next thing you'll tell me you don't see the Sun."

"A fact. I don't read newspapers, I write them – or used to. But what about this priest? I knew an Algarcife in my green and ambitious youth, but he wasn't a priest; he was a pagan, and a deuced solemn one at that."

They stood upon the gray stone steps, and the belated worshippers trooped past them to vespers. A woman with a virginal calm face and a camellia in her hymnal brushed them lightly, leaving a trail of luxurious sweetness on the air; a portly vestryman, with inflated cheeks and short-sighted eyes, mounted the steps pantingly, his lean and flat-chested wife hanging upon his arm; a gray-browed gentlewoman, her eyes inscrutable with chastity unsurprised, held her black silk skirt primly as she ascended, carrying her prayer-book as if it were a bayonet.

In the street a carriage was standing, the driver yawning above his robes. From the quivering flanks of the horses a white steam rose like mist. Near the horses' hoofs a man born blind sat with a tray of matches upon his knee.

"Why, that's the jolliest part!" responded the first man, with a tolerant smile. "This one was an atheist once – or something of the sort, but the old man – Father Speares, I mean – got hold of him, and a conversion followed. And, by Jove, he has driven all the women into a religious mania! I believe he could found a new faith to-morrow if he'd be content with female apostles."

Driscoll shrugged his shoulders. "Religion might be called the feminine element of modern society," he observed. "It owes its persistence to the attraction of sex, and St. Paul was shrewd enough to foresee it. He knew when he forbade women to speak in public that he was insuring congregations of feminine posterity. Oh, it is sex – sex that moves the world!"

"And mars it."

"The same thing. Listen!"

As the heavy doors swung back, the voices of the choir swelled out into the faint sunshine, the notes of a high soprano skimming bird-like over the deeper voices of the males and the profundo of the organ.

When next Driscoll spoke it was with sudden interest. "I say, Ryder, if this is Algarcife, why on earth did he turn theologian? Any evidences of brain softening?"

"Hardly. It is a second Tractarian excitement, with Algarcife for the leader. The High-Church party owes him canonization, as I said to the bishop yesterday. He is the best advertising medium of the century. After Father Speares died, he took things in hand, you know, and raised a thunder-cloud. The old man's mantle fell upon him, along with whatever worldly possessions he possessed. Then some physiologist named Clynn got him into a controversy, and it was like applying an electric-battery to the sluggish limbs of the Church."

Driscoll gave a low whistle.

"Well, as I'm alive!" he said. "What is it all for, anyway?"

"Let's go inside," said Ryder, drawing his collar about his throat. "Beastly chill for October. Wind's due east."

For an instant they paused in the vestibule; then Ryder laid his hand upon the door; it swung open, and they entered the church.

At first the change of light dazzled Driscoll, and he raised his hand to his eyes; then, lowering it, he leaned against a pillar and looked over the heads of the congregation. A mellow obscurity flooded the nave, lightening in opalescent values where the stained-glass windows cast faint glints of green and gold. The atmosphere was so highly charged with color that it seemed to possess the tangible qualities of fine gauze, drawn in transparent tissue from the vaulted ceiling to the gray dusk of the aisles. A single oblique ray of sunshine, filtering through a western pane, crept slowly along the walls to the first station of the cross, where it lay warm and still. Through the heavy luminousness the voices of the choir swelled in triumphant acclamation:

"And His mercy is on them that fear Him:Throughout all generations.He hath showed strength with His arm:He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.He hath put down the mighty from their seat."

Beyond the rood-screen in the chancel the candles on the altar flickered in yellow flames beneath a slight draught. Above them, from the window, a Christ in red and purple fainted beneath his crown of thorns. At the foot of the crucifix a heap of white chrysanthemums lay like snow.

Before the candles and the cross the priest stood in his heavy vestments, his face turned towards the altar, the sanctuary-lamp shining above his head. Around him incense rose in clouds of fragrant smoke, and through the vapor his dark head and white profile were drawn against the foot of the cross. The yellow candle-light, beside which the gas-light grew pallid, caught the embroideries on the hood of the cope, and they glistened like jewels.

He stood motionless when the censing was over, stray wreaths of mist encircling his head. Then, when the Magnificat was finished, he turned from the altar, the light rippling in the gold of his vestments. His glance fell for a moment upon his congregation, then upon the mute faces of his choristers seated and within the chancel.

Through the reading of the lesson he sat silently. There was no suggestion of emotion in his closed lips, and the composure in his eyes did not lessen when he rose and came forward, meeting the hush in the church. From the stillness of the altar his voice rose suddenly, sustaining the chant of the choir in a deep undertone of unwavering richness:

"I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. And in Jesus Christ, His only Son – … I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints – the forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection of the body – and the life everlasting – Amen."

When the organ burst forth into the recessional hymn, Driscoll turned to his companion. "Come outside," he said. "I feel as if I had been drinking. And it was Algarcife – "

Half an hour later Father Algarcife left the church, and, crossing to Broadway, boarded a down-town car. At Twentieth Street he got out and turned eastward. He walked slowly, with long, almost mechanical strides. His head was bent and his shoulders stooped slightly, but there was a suggestion of latent vigor in his appearance, as if he carried a reserve fund of strength of which his brain had not yet taken account. Beneath the rich abundance of his hair his features struck one with peculiar force. They had the firm and compressed look which is the external mark of sterile emotions, and the traces of nervous wear on brow and lips showed like the scars of past experiences rather than the wounds of present ones. His complexion possessed that striking pallor resulting from long physical waste, a pallor warmed by tawny tones beneath the surface, deepening into bluish shadows about his closely shaven mouth and chin. In his long clerical coat he seemed to have gained in height, and the closest observer would perhaps have detected in his face only a physical illustration of the spiritual function he fulfilled. In another profession he would have suggested the possible priest – the priest unordained by circumstances. As it was, he presented the appearance of having been inserted in his ecclesiastical position from a mere æsthetic sense of fitness on the part of Destiny.

Although it was an afternoon in early October, the winds, blowing from the river along the cross-town blocks, had an edge of frost. Overhead the sky was paling into tones of dull lavender that shaded into purple where the west was warmed by stray vestiges of the afterglow. Through the dusk the street lights flickered here and there like swarming fire-flies. As he passed the Post-graduate Hospital at the corner of Second Avenue a man came down the steps and joined him.

"Good-afternoon, father," he said. "Your charge is coming on finely. Going in?"

His name was Salvers, and he was a rising young specialist in pulmonary troubles. He had met Father Algarcife in his work among the poor on the East Side.

"Not to-day," responded the other; "but I am glad to have good news of the little fellow."

He was known to have endowed one of the babies' cots and to feel great interest in its occupant.

Dr. Salvers returned his quiet gaze with one of sudden admiration. "What a wonder you are!" he said. "If there is a man in New York who does your amount of work, I don't know him. But take my advice and slacken speed. You will kill yourself."

Into Father Algarcife's eyes a gleam of humor shot. It went out as suddenly as it had come, and a tinge of sadness rose to the surface.

"Perhaps I am trying to," he answered, lightly.

"It looks like it. Here's Sunday, and you've come from a half-dozen services to run at the call of a beggar or so who might have had the politeness to wait till week-day. How is the Bowery Mission?"

"Very well," responded the other, showing an interest for the first time. "I have persuaded ten converts to take the pledge of a daily bath. It was tough work."

Salvers laughed. "I should say so. But, you know, that is what I like about your mission. It has the virtue of confusing cleanliness with godliness. Are you still delivering your sermons on hygiene?"

"Yes. You know we have been sending out nurses to women in confinement in connection with those Sunday-night lectures on the care of children. The great question of the tenement-house is the one of the children it produces."

The light that fired his features had chased from them their habitual expression of lethargic calm.

"It is a great work," said the doctor, enthusiastically. "But, do you know, father, it seems to me odd that so intense a believer in the rules of the rubric should have been the first to put religion into practical use among the poor. It seems a direct contradiction to the assertion that the association of the love of beauty with the love of God destroys sympathy for poverty and disease."

A cloud passed over the other's face.

"My predecessor prepared the ground for me," he replied, constrainedly. "I hope to sow the seed for future usefulness."

"And capital seed it is. But, as I said, it saps the sower. You are running a race with Death. No man can work as you work and not pay the penalty. Get an extra assistant."

Father Algarcife shook his head.

"They cannot do my work," he answered. "That is for me. As for consequences – well, the race is worth them. If Death wins or I – who knows?"

His rich voice rang with an intonation that was almost reckless. Then his tone changed.

"I go a block or two farther," he said. "Good-day."

And he passed on, the old lethargy settling upon his face.

At some distance he stopped, and, entering a doorway, ascended the stairs to the second landing. A knock at the first door brought a blear-eyed child with straight wisps of hair and a chronic cold in the head. She looked at him with dull recognition.

"Is Mrs. Watson worse?" he asked, gently.

A voice from the room beyond reached him in the shrill tones of one unreconciled to continual suffering.

"Is it the father?" it said. "Show him in. Ain't I been lying here and expecting him all day?" The voice was querulous and sharp. Father Algarcife entered the room and crossed to where the woman lay.

The bed was squalid, and the unclean odors of the disease consuming her flesh hung about the quilt and the furniture. The yellow and haggard face upon the pillow was half-obscured by a bandage across the left cheek.

As he looked down at her there was neither pity nor repulsion in his glance. It was merely negative in quality.

"Has the nurse been here to-day?" he asked, in the same gentle voice.

The woman nodded, rolling her bandaged head upon the pillow. "Ain't you going to sit down, now you've come?" she said.

He drew a chair to the bedside and sat down, laying his hand on the burning one that played nervously upon the quilt.

"Are you in pain?"

"Always – night and day."

He looked at her for a moment in silence; then he spoke soothingly. "You sent for me," he said. "I came as soon as the services were over."

She answered timidly, with a faint deprecation:

"I thought I was going. It came all faint-like, and then it went away."

A compassion more mental than emotional awoke in his glance.

"It was weakness," he answered. "You know this is the tenth time in the last fortnight that you have felt it. When it comes, do you take the medicine?"

She stirred pettishly.

"I 'ain't no belief in drugs," she returned. "But I don't want to go alone, with nobody round but the child."

He held the withered hand in his as he rose. "Don't be afraid," he answered. "I will come if you want me. Has the milk been good? And do you remember to watch the unfolding of that bud on the geranium? It will soon blossom."

He descended the stairs and went out into the street. At Madison Avenue he took the car to Fortieth Street. Near the corner, on the west side, there was a large brown-stone house, with curtains showing like gossamer webs against the lighted interiors of the rooms. He mounted the steps, rang the bell, and entered through an archway of palms the carpeted hall.

"Say to Miss Vernish that it is Father Algarcife," he said, and passed into the drawing-room.

A woman, buried amid the pillows of a divan, rose as he entered and came towards him, her trailing skirts rustling over the velvet carpet. She was thin and gray-haired, with a faded beauty of face and a bitter mouth. She walked as if impatient of a slight lameness in her foot.

"So you got my message," she said. "I waited for you all day yesterday. I am ill – ill and chained to this couch. I have not been to church for eight weeks, and I have needed the confessional. See, my nerves are trying me. If you had only come sooner."

She threw herself upon the couch and he seated himself on a chair beside her. The heavily shaded lamplight fell over the richness of the room, over the Turkish rugs scattered upon the floor, over the hangings of old tapestries on the walls, and over the shining bric-à-brac reflected in long mirrors. As he leaned forward it fell upon his features and softened them to sudden beauty.

"I am sorry," he answered, "but I could not come yesterday, and to-day a woman dying of cancer sent for me."

She crushed a pillow beneath her arm, smiling a little bitterly.

"Oh, it is your poor!" she said. "It is always your poor! We rich must learn to yield precedence – "

"It is not a question of wealth or of poverty," he returned. "It is one of suffering. Can I help you?"

The bitterness faded from her mouth. "You can let me believe in you," she said. "Don't you know that it is because you despise my money that I call for you? I might have sent for a hundred persons yesterday who would have outrun my messenger. But I could not bring you an instant sooner for all my wealth – no, not even for the sake of the church you love."

"How do you know?" he asked, gravely. "Call no man unpurchasable until he has been bargained for."

She looked at him passionately. "That is why I give to your church," she went on; "because to you my thousand counts no more than my laundress's dime."

"But it does," he corrected; "and the church is grateful."

"But you?"

"I am the instrument of the church."

"The pillar, you mean."

He shook his head. There was no feeling in voice or eyes – but there was no hardness.

"I love your church," she went on, more gently. "I love what you have made of it. I love religion because it produces men like you —

"Stop," he said, in a voice that flinched slightly.

She raised her head with a gesture that had a touch of defiance. "Why should I stop?" she asked. "Do you think God will mind if I give His servant his due? Yesterday religion was nothing to me; to-day it is everything, and it is you who have been its revelation. Why should I not tell you so?"

He was regarding her with intentness.

"And you are happier?" he asked.

"Happier! It is an odd word for a woman like me. I am fifty years old, I am alone, I am loveless. It has given me something to hope for, that is all."

"Yes?"

With a sudden yearning she stretched out her thin, white hands in appeal.

"Talk to me," she said. "Make me feel it. I am so alone."

When Father Algarcife descended the brown-stone steps an hour later, his face was drawn and his lips firmly closed. The electric light, shining upon his resolute features, gave them the look of marble.

He turned into Fifth Avenue and continued his way to Fifty-eighth Street. Before the door of the rectory, which was at the distance of a stone's-throw from the church, a carriage was drawn up to the sidewalk, and as he passed his name was called softly in a woman's voice:

"It is I – Mrs. Bruce Ryder. I have been waiting in the hope of seeing you."

He paused on the sidewalk and his hand closed over the one she gave him. She was a large, fair woman, with a superb head and shoulders, and slow, massive movements, such as the women of the old masters must have had.

"It is to force a promise that you will dine with me to-morrow," she said. "You have disappointed me so often – and I must talk with you." Her voice had a caressing inflection akin to the maternal.

He smiled into her expectant face.

"Yes," he said. "To-morrow – yes; I will do so. That is, if you won't wait for me if I am detained."

"That is kind," she responded. "I know you hate it. And I won't wait. I remember that you don't eat oysters."

The maternal suggestion in her manner had deepened. She laughed softly, pleased at the knowledge of his trivial tastes her words betrayed.

"But I won't keep you," she went on, "Thank you again – and good-bye."

The carriage rolled into the street, and he drew out a latch-key and let himself in at the rectory door, which opened on the sidewalk.

CHAPTER II

Mrs. Bruce Ryder unfolded her napkin and cast a swift glance over the heavy damask, sparkling with glass and silver.

"Yes; he is late," she said; "but he doesn't like to be waited for."

From the foot of the table Mr. Bruce Ryder smiled complacently, his eye upon his Blue Points.

"And his wish is law, even unto the third and fourth courses," he responded, pleasantly. "As far as Mrs. Ryder is concerned, the pulpit of the Church of the Immaculate Conception is a modern Mount Sinai."

"Bruce, how can you?" remonstrated his wife, upbraiding him across the pink shades of candles and a centre-piece of orchids. "And you are so ignorant. There is no pulpit in the church."

"The metaphor holds. Translate pulpit into altar-step – and you have the Mount Sinai."

"Minus Jehovah," commented Claude Nevins, who sat between a tall, slight girl, fresh from boarding-school, and a stout lady with an enormous necklace.

Ryder shook his head with easy pleasantry. He had been handsome once, and was still well groomed. His figure had thickened, but was not unshapely, and had not lost a certain athletic grace. His face was fair, with a complexion that showed a faint purplish flush beneath the skin, paling where his smooth flaxen hair was parted upon his forehead. On the crown of his head there was a round bald spot which had the effect of transparency. His deceptive frankness of manner was contradicted by an expression of secretiveness in his light-blue eyes.

He lifted the slice of lemon from his plate, squeezing it with his ruddy and well-formed fingers.

"Oh, but he's a divinity in his own right!" he retorted. "Apollo turned celibate, you know. He is the Lothario of religions – "

"Bruce!" said his wife again. A vexed light was shining in her eyes, giving a girlish look to her full and mature beauty. She wore a dress of black gauze, cut low from her splendid shoulders, above which her head, with its ash-blond hair, rose with a poise that was almost pagan in its perfection.

"For my part," said a little lady upon Mr. Ryder's right, "Mount Sinai or not, I quite feel that he speaks with God."

Her name was Dubley, and she was round and soft and white, suggesting the sugar-coated dinner-pills which rested as the pedestal of her social position, since her father, with a genius for turning opportunities to account, had coined into gold the indigestion of his fellows.

"Ah! You are a woman," returned Ryder, smilingly. "You might as well ask a needle to resist a magnet as a woman to resist a priest. I wonder what the attraction is?"

"Aberration of the religious instinct," volunteered Nevins, who had not lost his youthful look with his youthful ardor, and whom success had appeared to settle without surfeiting.

"On the contrary," interposed a short-sighted gentleman in eye-glasses, who regarded the oyster upon his fork as if he expected to recognize an old acquaintance, "the religious instinct is entirely apart from the vapid feminine sentimentalizing over men in long coats and white neckties. Indeed, I question if woman has developed the true religious instinct. I am collecting notes for a treatise upon the subject."

He stopped breathlessly, swallowed his oyster, and looked gloomily at the table-cloth. His name was Layton, and he was a club-man who had turned criminologist for a whim. Having convinced himself by generalizations from experience of the total depravity of the female sex, he had entered upon his researches in the hope of verifying his deductions.

The point he advanced being called in question by a vivacious and pretty woman who sat next him, there followed a short debate upon the subject. When it was ended, John Driscoll looked up languidly from Mrs. Ryder's left hand.

"My dear Layton," he advised, "return to the race-course if you value your sanity. The enigma of the Sphinx is merely the woman question in antiquity and stone." Then he turned to Mrs. Ryder. "How is the renowned father?" he inquired. "I was decoyed into buying a volume of his sermons this morning."

A smile shone upon him from her large, pale eyes. "Oh yes," she responded, her beauty quickening from its repose. "They are in answer to those articles in the Scientific Weekly. Are they not magnificent?"