He was four-tenths sag that morning—the Rev. Allan Dare. In the Jubilate, a small choir-boy—a phenomenon who was paid a thousand a year, and was responsible for the presence of not a few of the four hundred—had sung 'Be sure ye that the Lord he is God,' to the ravishment of the congregation—not of the rector, who stood looking dead ahead. The First Lesson had been all about Jonadab, the son of Rechab, and drinking no wine—frightful ineptness! What could it mean to any one? how help any one? Here was Life, with all its cruel tangles, tighter and more choking every day. Here was Arnold's darkling plain, and the confused alarms and the ignorant armies clashing by night.
There came back to Dare the creed he had heard in the smoking compartment: 'I think it ought to be run,—the world,—even if it's mussed-up to the limit, and I think it's up to us to keep it running. I think there's a manager of it all in the central office—a manager, understand, though he never seems to show up around the works, and certainly does seem to have some of the darnedest ways.'
'O God!' breathed Allan Dare, 'there are so many things—so many things!'
It was the same Sunday. Professor William Emory Browne was for the first time on crutches, and stood supported by them at his window.
'Back again,' he ruminated. 'I can probably drive to my classes in another week. Then the same old grind, showing ingenuous youth—who fortunately will not see it—how "the search hath taught me that the search is vain." Ho, hum! How very kind, that Mr. Squem,—he did so much for me,—and how very funny! I should like to produce him at the seminar—with his just-right clothes, his dream of culture via his Universal History, his approach to reality through a picture postal-card!'
He turned on himself almost savagely. Then,—
'What the devil are you patronizing him for? Don't you see that he is hooked to something and you are not, that he is warm and you are freezing, that he is part of the wave,—the wave, man,—and that you are just a miserable, tossing clot?'
It was the same Sunday. Mr. Squem sat in his room—extremely dennish, smitingly red as to walls, oppressive with plush upholstery. A huge deerhead, jutting from over the mantel, divided honors with a highly-colored September Morn, affrontingly framed. On a shelf stood a small bottle. It contained a finger of Mr. Squem, amputated years before, in alcohol.
On the knees of the owner of the room was Volume One of the Universal History—Number 32, so red-ink figures affirmed, of a limited edition of five hundred sets. Mr. Squem's name was displayed, in very large Old English, on the fly-leaf, and above was an empty oval wherein his portrait might be placed.
'No use,' soliloquized the owner of this treasure, 'no use. If I could chew it up and get it down,—or two of it,—that wouldn't slide under the thing that isn't there. Nothing will ever put me in the class of Professor Browne or that preacher on the car, or bring the rest of me up to my clothes.'