CHAPTER VII

THE KINGDOMS OF THE WORLD

I

When summer arrived, the birds of brilliant plumage of Mr. Hodder's
flock arose and flew lightly away, thus reversing the seasons. Only the
soberer ones came fluttering into the cool church out of the blinding
heat, and settled here and there throughout the nave. The ample Mr.
Bradley, perspiring in an alpaca coat, took up the meagre collection on
the right of the centre aisle; for Mr. Parr, properly heralded, had gone
abroad on one of those periodical, though lonely tours that sent
anticipatory shivers of delight down the spines of foreign
picture-dealers. The faithful Gordon Atterbury was worshipping at the
sea, and even Mr. Constable and Mr. Plimpton, when recalled to the city
by financial cares, succumbed to the pagan influence of the sun, and were
usually to be found on Sunday mornings on the wide veranda of the country
club, with glasses containing liquid and ice beside them, and surrounded
by heaps of newspapers.

To judge by St. John's, the city was empty. But on occasions, before
he himself somewhat tardily departed,--drawn thither by a morbid though
impelling attraction, Hodder occasionally walked through Dalton Street
of an evening. If not in St. John's, summer was the season in Dalton
Street. It flung open its doors and windows and moved out on the steps
and the pavements, and even on the asphalt; and the music of its cafes
and dance-halls throbbed feverishly through the hot nights. Dalton
Street resorted neither to country club nor church.

Mr. McCrae, Hodder's assistant, seemed to regard these annual phenomena
with a grim philosophy,--a relic, perhaps, of the Calvinistic determinism
of his ancestors. He preached the same indefinite sermons, with the same
imperturbability, to the dwindled congregations in summer and the
enlarged ones in winter. But Hodder was capable of no such resignation
--if resignation it were, for the self-contained assistant continued to be
an enigma; and it was not without compunction that he left, about the
middle of July, on his own vacation. He was tired, and yet he seemed to
have accomplished nothing in this first year of the city parish whereof
he had dreamed. And it was, no doubt, for that very reason that he was
conscious of a depressing exhaustion as his train rolled eastward over
that same high bridge that spanned the hot and muddy waters of the river.
He felt a fugitive. In no months since he had left the theological
semi