The Bucholz family disappeared noiselessly as they had arrived; and when the stifle of summer disappeared as well, one of that family was still remembered in Bronx. Now and then, in some leaf-bound quietude that was stirred if at all but by the call of some ruffian bawling to the cows, Gonfallon had caught himself wishing for the wider spheres that lay beyond the hills and musing through fringes of melancholy on the desolateness of his life. Thus far the feminine had been apart from his existence. In the first fervors of the calling which he had adopted, the celibacy of the priesthood in the Mother Church had seemed to him obligatory on whomso devoted his energies to Christ, and unprompted he had paraphrased a familiar dictum—a cleric married is a cleric marred. As an adolescent he had been of too shy and vibrant a nature to consort in comfort with the combustible maidens of the Massachusettsian town in which his boyhood had been passed, and at the university the mysticism of the spirit had dulled the virility of the flesh. But now the first fervors had gone. He had weighed the Mother Church; her laws had no hold on him. The mysticism with which he had spurned the earth had faded like spilt wine; while of his energies, nothing, apparently, had resulted. In his pastorate he was not disliked, but he was not appreciated. His predecessor had been oafish as his charges, and by that very oafishness the good will of the parish had been won—he had been of themselves; whereas Gonfallon was of a clay so fine that they felt him above them, a fact which in itself was a reproach. Moreover, he was a bachelor: save his mother, their womenfolk had no one to receive them did they perpetrate a contribution-party, and about the stove in the village store the misdeeds of unmarried divines to which the press gave prominence had been chuckled over with envious and suspicious glee.
Presently the summer spent itself, the stifle departed; but before the earliest frost had used its palette on the leaves there came an invitation from the metropolis beyond. The Church of Gethsemane—nicknamed that of the Holy Bilk—that edifice which from the corner of Fifty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue projects sheer up into carolling azure the brownest and steepest of steeples, was in need of a new incumbent. The former rector—an exegete and eschatologist of more than passing note, a scholar possessed of rare controversial ability, and, parenthetically, English by birth, a man whose mere attitude and manner were pervasive with a seduction so alluring that through it depopulated pews had been repeopled and filled—suddenly had come to grief. In spite of the wage, ten thousand a year paid quarterly and in advance, he had managed to run up a hillock of debts which if not fabulous in size had been noisy and unseemly of utterance. At the initial clamor there had been a hush, then a murmur and an effort to suffocate the scandal in its cradle, but inarticulate whispers floated the facts abroad, the rector vanished, and Gethsemane, dubbed there and then the Church of the Holy Bilk, witnessed a procession of clerics ascending and descending the pulpit stair. But apparently no one of them had more than momentarily pleased. Then a call, prompted by Bucholz, had been voiced in Gonfallon’s ears. If he hesitated, not even his mother knew it. The dust of Bronx he shook from him. He came, he preached, and when the benediction was given, the rectorship was his.
At the hour when that intelligence was conveyed to him he escaped into solitude and with a finger beat a tattoo on his teeth. During that tattoo his thoughts went forward and back. He reviewed the negligent years, he interrogated the future. Behind him were bundles of baseless appearances, the mysticism which had shrouded his youth, the akosmism into which Berkeley had led him, then the long halt, the lintels of the village church; but now Fifth Avenue lay at his feet, beyond were the insignia of the episcopate, while in him pulsed that strength which brings the strophium to the conqueror. And as he peered at the stranger that was himself, anyone who had chanced that way would have discerned, not a man, but an aim. That day he called on Bucholz, and, not finding him at home, gave an hour to his daughter Ruth.
Gonfallon’s metropolitan success was immediate. He made no attempt to theorize with history; he did not meddle with Paul; the expounding of the gospels he left to others. With a set of people that fancied themselves in possession of advanced views and were still in the Middle Ages, he achieved the impossible: he not only consoled, he flattered, he persuaded and fascinated as well. In a word, he detained attention, not with home truths, however, but with issues and questions which few have energy enough to probe for themselves, and of which everyone wishes
