II
The Episcopal Palace. Beyond the somber length of the drawing-room an alcove with groined arches and fan-tracery—remains of the Carthusian chapel. A dolorous crucifixion by a pupil of El Greco, the sky menacing and wind-driven behind the gaunt figure of the dying god. Mullioned windows that still sparkled with the bearings of hard-riding bishops long since ignoble dust. The refectory table, a stony expanse of ancient oak, set round with grudging monkish chairs. And the library—on either side the lofty fireplace, austerely shining rows of calf-bound wisdom now dead as were the bishops.
The picture must be held in mind, because it is so beautifully opposite to the residence of the Reverend Dr. Wesley R. Toomis, bishop of the Methodist area of Zenith.
Bishop Toomis’ abode was out in the section of Zenith called Devon Woods, near the junction of the Chaloosa and Appleseed rivers, that development (quite new in 1913, when Elmer Gantry first saw it) much favored by the next-to-the-best surgeons, lawyers, real estate dealers, and hardware wholesalers. It was a chubby modern house, mostly in tapestry brick with varicolored imitation tiles, a good deal of imitation half-timbering in the gables, and a screened porch with rocking-chairs, much favored on summer evenings by the episcopal but democratic person of Dr. Toomis.
The living-room had built-in bookshelves with leaded glass, built-in seats with thin brown cushions, and a huge electrolier with shades of wrinkled glass in ruby, emerald, and watery blue. There were a great many chairs—club chairs, Morris chairs, straight wooden chairs with burnt-work backs—and a great many tables, so that progress through the room was apologetic. But the features of the room were the fireplace, the books, and the foreign curios.
The fireplace was an ingenious thing. Basically it was composed of rough-hewn blocks of a green stone. Set in between the larger boulders were pebbles, pink and brown and earth-colored, which the good bishop had picked up all over the world. This pebble, the bishop would chirp, guiding you about the room, was from the shore of the Jordan, this was a fragment from the Great Wall of China, and this he had stolen from a garden in Florence. They were by no means all the attractions of the fireplace. The mantel was of cedar of Lebanon, genuine, bound with brass strips from a ship wrecked in the Black Sea in 1902—the bishop himself had bought the brass in Russia in 1904. The andirons were made from plowshares as used by the bishop himself when but an untutored farm lad, all unaware of coming glory, in the cornfields of Illinois. The poker was, he assured you, a real whaling harpoon, picked up, surprisingly cheap, at Nantucket. Its rude shaft was decorated with a pink bow. This was not the doing of the bishop but of his lady. Himself, he said, he preferred the frank, crude, heroic strength of the bare woods, but Mrs. Toomis felt it needed a touch, a brightening—
Set in the rugged chimney of the fireplace was a plaque of smooth marble on which was carved in artistic and curly and gilded letters: “The Virtue of the Home is Peace, the Glory of the Home is Reverence.”
The books were, as the bishop said, “worth browsing over.” There were, naturally, the Methodist Discipline and the Methodist Hymnal, both handsomely bound Roycrofty in limp blue calfskin with leather ties; there was an impressive collection of Bibles, including a very ancient one, dated 1740, and one extra-illustrated with all the Hoffmann pictures and one hundred and sixty other Biblical scenes; and there were the necessary works of theological scholarship befitting a bishop—Moody’s Sermons, Farrar’s Life of Christ, Flowers and Beasties of the Holy Land, and In His Steps, by Charles Sheldon. The more workaday ministerial books were kept in the study.
But the bishop was a man of the world and his books fairly represented his tastes. He had a complete Dickens, a complete Walter Scott, Tennyson in the red-line edition bound in polished tree calf with polished gilt edges, many of the better works of Macaulay and Ruskin and, for lighter moments, novels by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Winston Churchill, and Elizabeth of the German Garden. It was in travel and nature-study that he really triumphed. These were represented by not less than fifty volumes with such titles as How to Study the Birds, Through Madagascar with Camp and Camera, My Summer in the Rockies, My Mission in Darkest Africa, Pansies for Thoughts, and London from a Bus. Nor had the bishop neglected history and economics: he possessed the Rev. Dr. Hockett’s Complete History of the World: Illustrated, in eleven handsome volumes, a secondhand copy of Hartley’s Economics, and The Solution of Capitalism vs. Labor—Brotherly Love.
Yet not the fireplace, not the library, so much as the souvenirs of foreign travel gave to the bishop’s residence a flair beyond that of most houses in Devon Woods. The bishop and his lady were fond of travel. They had made a six months’ inspection of missions in Japan, Korea, China, India, Borneo, Java, and the Philippines, which gave the bishop an authoritative knowledge of all Oriental governments, religions, psychology, commerce, and hotels. But besides that, six several summers they had gone to Europe, and usually on the more refined and exclusive tours. Once they had spent three solid weeks seeing nothing but London—with side-trips to Oxford, Canterbury, and Stratford—once they had taken a four-day walking trip in the Tyrol, and once on a channel steamer they had met a man who, a steward said, was a Lord.
The living-room reeked with these adventures. There weren’t exactly so many curios—the bishop said he didn’t believe in getting a lot of foreign furniture and stuff when we made the best in the world right here at home—but as to pictures—The Toomises were devotees of photography, and they had brought back the whole world in shadow.
Here was the Temple of Heaven at Peking, with the bishop standing in front of it. Here was the Great Pyramid, with Mrs. Toomis in front of it. Here was the cathedral at Milan, with both of them in front of it—this had been snapped for them by an Italian guide, an obliging gentleman who had assured the bishop that he believed in prohibition.