Short Fiction · A Transaction In Hearts (2/12) (2/2)

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 to be informed. And therewith he could be austere, stern even, and he could wield an epigram like a glaive. He was in earnest, too.

It was towards the close of a political contest that he first donned the rector’s gown. On that occasion the President happened to be in the middle aisle. Gonfallon, however, with an apposite text for foreword, took up the question at once. For three-quarters of an hour he held the most indifferent congregation in New York with the topic for which they cared the least. And at the close, with a gesture that swept the church, “Not politics,” he cried, “but religion is the nation’s soul.” It was in this wise that the congregation was won.

Incidentally he did not neglect Bucholz, nor yet Bucholz’ daughter. The girl was shyly willing; as for Gonfallon, he was wholly in love. The dream of celibacy faded, as dreams ever do. He asked, and with sweet reluctance it was given. His mother, who had migrated with him from Bronx, departed to the Massachusettsian homestead; and after the brief honeymoon he settled down to his pastorate charge.

Meanwhile, Bucholz’ younger daughter, Claire, had been sent abroad in search of masters of foreign arts and tongues; and abroad for four years she remained⁠—in fact, until Bucholz, caught in a mousetrap which that arch-hunter Jerolomon had set for him, saw the amassments of his own booty, twenty million at least, evaporate in a night. Six weeks later Claire landed in New York.

And now, the morning of her arrival, as Gonfallon lounged back through the past, the episodes of his career paraded unsummoned before him. He saw himself on the singing sands of the Beverly coast, he saw the elms of the village street, he heard the unprompted prayers of his youth and the sound of his own voice vibrating for the first time through the aisles of Gethsemane. Faces long forgotten returned to him and smiled. Incidents that were trivial ousted others that were grave⁠—the trick the countess had of polishing the handle of her crutch, the vividness of certain dreams, one in particular that had haunted him, sporadically, for years⁠—the idea that he had ascended the pulpit in pajamas and was unable to hide⁠—the tennis-match in which Ruth had played, and which, a sunstroke and a check of perspiration aiding, had resulted in the neuralgia which kept her to her room.

At the thought of her he drew a breath that resembled a sigh. For Ruth, in her enforced seclusion, seemed to have resigned herself to invalidism and the matter-of-fact. The breeziness which had won him to her had gone, gone too the impromptu of her speech, the savors that had so allured. Three years of marriage, and in place of the sensitive, high-strung girl there was a languid woman who each day at stated intervals consumed a furtive pill. His love for her, that love which he had accounted measureless, and which in the earliest transports of the unexpected had thrown him at her feet, impelling him in the belief there was none that could fill his life as she, and prompting him in the utterance, Non hodie solum, sed in aeternum te adorabo⁠—that love which in the possibilities of its expansion had seemed a contingent of the infinite had narrowed into an unsuggestive bond. Where is the Vandal that invented marriage? Gonfallon put to himself no such query. Unquestionably he was happy in his household; but to the happiest of households there comes a moment of regret.