The Seeker

by Harry Leon Wilson

And to these communicants their rector of the flawless pulchritude was a gracious spectacle, not only in the performance of his sacerdotal offices, but on the thoroughfares of the city, where his distinction was not less apparent than back of the chancel rail.

A certain popular avenue runs between rows of once splendid mansions now struggling a little awkwardly into trade on their lowest floors, like impoverished but courageous gentlefolk. To these little tragedies, however, the pedestrian throng is obtuse—blind to the pathos of those still haughty upper floors, silent and reserved, behind drawn curtains, while the lower two floors are degraded into shops. In so far as the throng is not busied with itself, its attention is upon the roadway, where is ever passing a festival procession of Success, its floats of Worth Rewarded being the costliest and shiniest of the carriage-maker's craft—eloquent of true dignity and fineness even in the swift silence of their rubber tires. This is a spectacle to be viewed seriously; to be mocked at only by the flippant, though the moving pedestrian mass on the sidewalk is gayer of colour, more sentient—more companionable, more understandably human.

It was in this weaving mass on the walk that the communicants of St. Antipas were often refreshed by the vision of their rector on pleasant afternoons. Here the Reverend Doctor Linford loved to walk in God's sunlight out of sheer simple joy in living—happily undismayed by any possible consciousness that his progress turned all faces to regard him, as inevitably as one would turn the spokes of an endless succession of turnstyles.

Habited with an obviously loving attention to detail, yet with tasteful restraint, a precise and frankly confessed, yet never obtrusive, elegance, bowing with a manner to those of his flock favoured by heaven to meet him, superbly, masculinely handsome, he was far more than a mere justification of the pride St. Antipas felt in him. He was a splendid inspiration to belief in God and man.

Nor was he of the type Pharasaic—the type to profess love for its kind, yet stay scrupulously aloof from the vanquished and court only the victors. Indeed, this was not so.

In the full tide of his progress—it was indeed a progress and never a mere walk—he would stop to address a few words of simple cheer to the aged female mendicant—perhaps to make a joke with her—some pleasantry not unbefitting his station, his mien denoting a tender chivalry which has been agreeably subdued though not impaired by the experience inevitable to a man of the world. When he dropped the coin into the withered palm, he did it with a certain lingering hurriedness, as one frankly unable to repress a human weakness, though nervously striving to have it over quickly and by stealth.

Young Rigby Reeves, generalising, as it later appeared, from inadequate data, swore once that the rector of St. Antipas kept always an eye ahead for the female mendicant in the tattered shawl and the bonnet of inferior modishness; that, if the Avenue was crowded enough to make it seem worth while, he would even cross from one side to the other for the sake of speaking to her publicly.

While the fact so declared may have been a fact, the young man's corollary that the rector of St. Antipas sought this experience for the sake of its mere publicity came from a prejudice which closer acquaintance with Dr. Linford happily dissolved from his mind. As reasonably might he have averred, as did another cynic, that the rector of St. Antipas was actuated by the instincts of a mountebank when he selected his evening papers each day—deliberately and with kind words— from the stock of a newswoman at a certain conspicuous and ever-crowded crossing. As reasonable was the imputation of this other cynic, that in greeting friends upon the thronged avenue, the rector never failed to use some word or phrase that would identify him to those passing, giving the person addressed an unpleasant sense of being placed in a lime-light, yet reducing him to an insignificance just this side the line of obliteration.

"You say, 'Ah, Doctor!' and shake hands, you know," said this hypercritical observer, "and, ten to one, he says something about St. Antipas directly, you know, or—'Tell him to call on Dr. Linford at the rectory adjoining St. Antipas—I'm always there at eleven,' or 'Yes, quite true, the bishop said to me, "My dear Linford, we depend on you in this matter,"' or telling how Mrs. General Somebody-Something, you know—I never could remember names—took him down dreadfully by calling him the most dangerously fascinating man in New York. And there you are, you know! It never fails, on my word! And all the time people are passing and turning to stare and listen, you know, so that it's quite rowdy—saying 'Yes—that's Linford— there he is,' quite as if they were on one of those coaches seeing New York; and you feel, by Jove, I give you my word, like the solemn ass who goes up on the stage to help the fellow do his tricks, you know, when he calls for 'some kind gentleman from the audience.'"

It may be told that this other person was of a cynicism hopelessly indurated. Not so with Rigby Reeves, even after Reeves alleged the other discoveries that the rector of St. Antipas had "a walk that would be a strut, by gad! if he was as short as I am"; also that he "walked like a parade," which, as expounded by Mr. Reeves, meant that his air in walking was that of one conscious always of leading a triumphal procession in his own honour; and again, that one might read in his eyes a keenly sensuous enjoyment in the tones of his own voice; that he coloured these with a certain unction corresponding to the flourishes with which people of a certain obliquity of mind love to ornament their chirography; still again that he, Reeves, was "ready to lay a bet that the fellow would continue to pose even at the foot of the Great White Throne."