Which seemed disastrously reasonable to the shamed Frank; and he went out to get ’em, and didn’t do so, and continued in his ministry.
He had heard in theological seminary of the “practise of the presence of God” as a papist mystery. Now he encountered it. Mr. Pengilly taught him to kneel, his mind free of all worries, all prides, all hunger, his lips repeating “Be thou visibly present with me”—not as a charm but that his lips might not be soiled with more earthly phrases—and, when he had become strained and weary and exalted, to feel a Something glowing and almost terrifying about him, and to experience thus, he was certain, the actual, loving, proven nearness of the Divinity.
He began to call his mentor Father Pengilly, and the old man eluded him only a little … presently did not chide him at all.
For all his innocence and his mysticism, Father Pengilly was not a fool nor weak. He spoke up harshly to a loud-mouthed grocer, new come to town, who considered the patriarch a subject for what he called “kidding,” and who shouted, “Well, I’m getting tired of waiting for you preachers to pray for rain. Guess you don’t believe the stuff much yourselves!” He spoke up to old Miss Udell, the purity specialist of the town, when she came to snuffle that Amy Dove was carrying on with the boys in the twilight. “I know how you like a scandal, Sister,” said he. “Maybe taint Christian to deny you one. But I happen to know all about Amy. Now if you’d go out and help poor old crippled Sister Eckstein do her washing, maybe you’d keep busy enough so’s you could get along without your daily scandal.”
He had humor, as well, Father Pengilly. He could smile over the cranks in the congregation. And he liked the village atheist, Doc Lem Staples. He had him at the house, and it healed Frank’s spirit to hear with what beatific calm Father Pengilly listened to the Doc’s jibes about the penny-pinchers and the sinners in the church.
“Lem,” said Father Pengilly, “you’ll be surprised at this, but I must tell you that there’s two-three sinners in your fold, too. Why, I’ve heard of even horse-thieves that didn’t belong to churches. That must prove something, I guess. Yes, sir, I admire to hear you tell about the kindhearted atheists, after reading about the cannibals, who are remarkably little plagued with us Methodists and Baptists.”
Not in his garden only but in the woods, along the river, Father Pengilly found God in Nature. He was insane about fishing—though indifferent to the catching of any actual fish. Frank floated with him in a mossy scow, in a placid backwater under the willows. He heard the gurgle of water among the roots and watched the circles from a leaping bass. The old man (his ruddy face and silver mustache shaded by a shocking hayfield straw hat) hummed “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea.” When Father Pengilly mocked him, “And you have to go to books to find God, young man!” then Frank was content to follow him, to be his fellow preacher, to depend more on Pengilly’s long experience than on irritating questions, to take any explanation of the validity of the Bible, of the mission of the church, the leadership of Christ, which might satisfy this soldier of the cross.
Frank became more powerful as a preacher. He went from Catawba, via pastorates in two or three larger towns, to Eureka, a camp of forty thousand brisk industrialists, and here he was picked up and married by the amiable Bess.
IV
Bess Needham, later to be Bess Shallard, was remarkably like a robin. She had the same cheerfulness, the same round ruddiness, and the same conviction that early rising, chirping, philoprogenitiveness, and strict attention to food were the aims of existence. She had met Frank at a church “social,” she had pitied what she regarded as his underfed pallor, she had directed her father, an amiable and competent dentist, to invite Frank home, for “a real feed” and bright music on the phonograph. She listened fondly to his talk—she had no notion what it was about, but she liked the sound of it.
He was stirred by her sleek neck, her comfortable bosom, by the dimpled fingers which stroked his hair before he knew that he longed for it. He was warmed by her assertion that he “put it all over” the Rev. Dr. Seager, the older Baptist parson in Eureka. So she was able to marry him without a struggle, and they had three children in the shortest possible time.
She was an admirable wife and mother. She filled the hot water bottle for his bed, she cooked corn beef and cabbage perfectly, she was polite to the most exasperating parishioners, she saved money, and when he sat with fellow clerics companionably worrying about the sacraments, she listened to him, and him alone, with beaming motherliness.
He realized that with a wife and three children he could not consider leaving the church; and the moment he realized it he began to feel trapped and to worry about his conscience all the more.
V
There was, in Eureka, with its steel mills, its briskness, its conflict between hard-fisted manufacturers and hardheaded socialists, nothing of the contemplation of Catawba, where thoughts seemed far-off stars to gaze on through the mist. Here was a violent rush of ideas, and from this rose the “Preachers’ Liberal Club,” toward which Frank was drawn before he had been in Eureka a fortnight.
The ringleader of these liberals was Hermann
