FATHER AND DAUGHTER
The door of the Reverend John Harting’s study was open. In the softened
afternoon light which came from the window above his desk, he sat,
giving his morrow’s sermon the last polishing touches. But when Janet
would have slipped past, he heard her light footstep, and called to
her. She stopped at the door.
“Come in, my dear,” he said, lifting his spectacles to his forehead,
and turning from the outspread pages of manuscript. “Would you mind
sitting down a moment? I have something I wish to say to you.”
He spoke precisely and formally, and even in ordinary conversation he
had a touch of that singsong intonation which all old-time ministers
affected. A fringe of white locks, carefully combed, added to the
somewhat stern, but almost patriarchal, expression of his angular,
deeply lined face. It was the fearless face of a good-hearted man, and
yet there was something about it indicative of narrowness and bigotry.
Such a face, one fancied, might have belonged to a leader of martyrs.
She came to him, and sat upon the arm of his chair, encircling his
neck, and patting his cheek.
“Now, father, dear,” she laughed coaxingly, “I hope you’re not going to
scold. I know you didn’t want me to go to the ball game, but I was just
dying to go, and Benton invited me, and――”
“He came round here, and cajoled me into consenting, against my will.
He is a young man with a most persuasive and flattering tongue.”
“I’ll not dispute you,” she said, thinking of those parting words at
the door. “He needed a persuasive tongue to win you over, you are so
dreadfully set against baseball. You can’t seem to realize that the
game itself is really harmless and clean, and two-thirds of the people
of this town are crazy over it. They’ll be crazier still after to-day,
for we beat Bancroft――shut ’em out without a single tally, gave ’em
nine beautiful goose eggs. What do you think of that, father?”
He looked a bit puzzled. “What have goose eggs to do with baseball, my
dear?”
“Oh,” she laughed, “I mean to say that we handed them a beautiful
coat of whitewash, and we bingled out a couple of merit marks for
ourselves. The crowd just went crazy when our new southpaw slant
artist started the fireworks going in the sixth with a clean wallop,
moved up a peg on a sacrifice, pilfered the third hassock, and slid
home on a beautiful squeeze that gave us our first count, and――”
“Stop, Janet!” he cried, bewildered. “What are you talking about?”
“Why, baseball, daddy! I’m simply telling you how we won the game.”
“You may be trying to tell me, but you are not doing it simply. ‘Coat
of whitewash,’ ‘bingle,’ ‘southpaw slant artist,’ ‘clean wallop,’
‘third hassock,’ ‘beautiful squeeze’! My dear, it’s dreadful for a
young lady to use such language. It is ample evidence of the absolutely
demoralizing influence of this game called baseball.”
She laughed still more gayly, and again patted his cheek caressingly.
“That’s simply the idiom of the game, which every true fan understands.”
“But you should remember that I am not a true fan, whatever that may
mean. I abhor slang, especially from the lips of a refined girl. You
know my efforts alone last year prevented the desecration of the
Sabbath by this dreadful game, which seems to turn people’s heads, and
is productive of untold strife and bitterness. What will be thought
now when my daughter is seen attending these games?”
“But they are not playing Sunday baseball, daddy, and I agree that
you were quite right in bringing your influence to bear against that,
though, as I said before, I hold that there is no harm in the game
itself.”
“There is harm in whatever produces harm, which is sufficient answer
to your argument. And look at the class of men who take part in those
games. Would you be proud to associate with them? Would you choose them
as friends?”
“No,” she confessed; “not many of them; but still there are some really
decent ones who play. Larry Stark is one. I know him, and I’m not
ashamed of it.”
“There may be an occasional exception, but you know the old saying that
exceptions prove the rule. Once in a while a respectable young man may
be led by necessity to make a business of baseball, but I am sure no
such young man will long continue to follow it up.”
“Respectable people watch the games. Some of the best people in
Kingsbridge were there to-day.”
“Which denotes a deplorable tendency of the times. And you must not
forget that this town has changed from a peaceful country settlement
to a place that is rough and crude, and filled with viciousness and
vice. I am having a struggle against these evil influences, and I need
the moral support of my daughter’s example, at least. If your mother
had lived――”
“Now, father, please don’t! You seem to have an idea that I’m a most
reckless, wicked young person, and you always use that form of argument
to shame me in my sinful ways. I saw in the grand stand to-day several
of the most respectable ladies in town, at least two of whom are
regular attendants at your church.”
“Some seed must fall on barren ground. I hope young King will not ask
you to go with him again. If he comes to me, I shall refuse my consent;
if you go, you will do so against my wishes.”
With him in this inflexible mood, she knew the uselessness of
persuasion or cajolery, and she left him, to run up to her room a few
moments before the maid should call them to tea. Removing her hat
before the mirror, she pouted a little at the charming reflection in
the glass.
“Father is so set,” she murmured; “yet I’ve always been able to bring
him round some way, and I must do it about this; for I just can’t stay
away from the games. I guess I’m a real fan, all right, and I’ll be
worse than ever with Kingsbridge winning from Bancroft, and――and Lefty
pitching. He’s surely what they can call _some pitcher_. And he can
fight――gracious!”
She shivered a bit at the recollection of the scene she had witnessed
after the game was over. Again she seemed to behold those fighting men
hammering at each other with their bare fists, savage, bloodstained,
brutal. She shuddered at the remembered glare of their eyes, the
wheezing of their panted breathing, and the crushing sound of their
blows. From her parted lips came a little gasp, as once more on her
ears seemed to fall the clear crack of Tom Locke’s fist smiting his foe
full on the point of the jaw with such force that Hoover’s legs had
given way beneath him like props of straw.
“He can pitch, and he can fight,” she whispered. “He looks clean and
manly, too. I wonder what he’s really like. I suppose he must be coarse
and vulgar. When father hears about that affair, he’ll be far more set
against the game than ever, and he’s sure to hear, for the whole town
must be talking of it now.”
While she made her toilet for tea, the clean-cut, determined face of
the young pitcher seemed to haunt her. Vexed by this, she decided to
put him resolutely out of her mind.
“I’m like a silly schoolgirl, seeking a hero to worship,” she laughed,
blushing at her folly. “I’m old enough to know better. Such heroes
always have feet of clay. Still, I’d like to think of him as well as
I can――as a pitcher; and, to do so, it is wise that I should view him
from afar, that his flaws may not be too apparent. I’ll take care about
that.”
Then her thoughts turned to Benton King, and a little frown gathered
upon her face. To-day, as they were driving homeward, and especially
as they were saying good night at the door, there had been something
in his manner and his words that he had never before unveiled to her.
Hitherto they had been just good friends――he deferential, in a way――yet
free and easy, as such friends might be, with no self-consciousness or
constraint; but now, after this, something warned her that it would be
changed, even though, as she believed, he had been neither deep nor
sincere in what he had felt or said.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, still frowning; “for I like Bent, and he’s
about the only young man in Kingsbridge I’d care to be really friendly
with. I suppose it’s been so long since he’s had an opportunity to
talk such nonsense to a girl that he just had to try it on some one to
keep in practice. But I don’t like it, and I’ll have to stop it. Next
time he tries it, I’ll chaff him till he quits. I’ll tell him I like
Lefty.”
She could not have chosen a more certain method of preventing Benton
King from quitting.