The Reverend Willett Ford Hunt read twice these closing words of the
long letter.
... and so, my dear Willie, to use your own way of expressing it, I
am steering straight for the devil--and enjoying the trip immensely.
Wishing you were with me, Willie, I am, even after your rather
bitter castigation,
Sincerely your friend,
Joe Hurley.
He laid the missive on his desk with a full-bosomed sigh. Nor was that
sigh wholly because of the reprobate Joe. Joe's flowers of speech did
not much ruffle the parson's spirit.
Joe Hurley might be gay, irresponsible, reckless, even downright wicked;
but he never could fail to be kind. Two years of close contact with the
blithe Westerner--those final two years at college before Hunt went to
the divinity school--had assured the latter that Joe Hurley owned a heart
of gold. The gold might be tarnished, but it was true metal
nevertheless.
Hunt's mental picture of his college friend, and never had scholastic
friendship been more astounding, could not include any great blemish of
later-developed character. It was five years since they had seen each
other. Those five years could not have made of Joe Hurley the
"roughneck" that he intimated he had become. That was Joe's penchant for
painting with a wide brush.
The reputation the Westerner had left behind him at college when he was
requested by a horrified governing board to depart for the sake of the
general welfare of the undergraduate body, revealed Joe's character
unequivocally.
When Joe had been "bounced" by the faculty he had celebrated the
occasion by giving a farewell banquet at one of the shadiest hotels in
the college town, to the wildest crowd of students he could get
together. On his own part Joe had dressed in full cowboy regalia, and as
the apex of the evening's entertainment he had "shot up" the banquet
room, paying the bill for damages the next morning with a cheerful
smile.
The Reverend Willett Ford Hunt remembered the occasion now with a little
shiver of apprehension. Suppose the people of Ditson Corners should ever
learn that he, their pastor, had been one of that company who had helped
Joe Hurley celebrate his dismissal from scholastic halls!
Joe's father, a cattleman, had left him a considerable fortune. Joe had
invested much of it in a certain mining claim called the Great Hope, for
the young fellow had been keen enough to see that the day of the small
cattleman was gone. The mine was paying a comfortable income with the
promise of doing more than that in the future, so Joe wrote. But he
wrote more--much more that was exceedingly interesting to Hunt in his
present discontented state of mind.
He picked up the letter again to re-read a part of the third page, this
broken sentence first meeting his envious eye:
... and if ever there was a peach, she surely is one, Willie.
Golden-brown hair, big blue eyes, and a voice--Say! No songbird ever
had anything on Nell. If you once saw her and heard her sing, you'd
go crazy about her, old sobersides. All Canyon Pass--I mean the
men-folks--are at her feet again, now she has returned to town and is
singing in Colorado Brown's cabaret. Sounds sort of devilish and
horrid, doesn't it, Willie? Believe me, Nell Blossom is some girl.
But wild--say! You can't get near her. She's got a laugh that plays
the deuce with a man's heart strings--accelerates the pit-a-pat of
the cardiac nerve to top-notch and then some! She's got us all on
her string, from gray-bearded sour doughs to the half-grown grocery
clerk at the Three Star, who would commit suicide to-morrow at her
behest--believe me!
But no man, Willie, has seemed yet to put the come hither on Nell
Blossom. She just won't be led, coaxed, or driven. She's as hard as
molded glass. A man-hater, if ever you heard of one. With all your
famed powers of persuasion, reverend, I'd like to make a wager that
you couldn't mold our Nell into a pattern of the New England
virtues, such as your own prim little sister has become by this
time, I've no doubt. No insult to Miss Betty intended, Willie. But
our Nell--well, you'd have your hands full in trying to make her do a
thing that she did not want to do.
The Reverend Willett Ford Hunt was stung here, not by the good-natured
raillery aimed at his own traits of character by his old college mate.
But why had Joe gone out of his way to drag Betty's name into it? It
seemed to be a mild slur upon his sister's character, and Hunt had an
uneasy feeling that he ought to resent it.
Betty had met Joe Hurley but once--to Hunt's knowledge. It was an
occasion when she had stopped at the college town on her way home from
boarding school. Hunt had met her at the station, and Joe had shown up,
too. The three of them had sought a restaurant where they ate, and Betty
had chattered like--well, just as a girl of her age and fresh from the
excitement of boarding school would chatter. When her first fear of the
big Westerner had worn off she had usurped the conversation almost
completely. Hunt had often thought since that Joe Hurley was quite
attracted by his lively sister.
But how did Joe know that Betty had changed so?
That his sister was not the same cheerful, brisk, chatterbox of a girl
she had been when Joe met her, Hunt quite well knew. And the change
puzzled him.
He visualized their Aunt Prudence Mason, who had lived all her long life
in the rut of New England spinsterhood, molding more or less the
characters of the orphaned brother and sister left at an early age to
her sole care. Was Betty, here in the straitened environment of Ditson
Corners, doomed to jog along the well-beaten track Aunt Prudence had
followed? The brother shuddered as he thought of it.
He glanced at Joe's letter once more. A golden-haired, blue-eyed girl
who really sang--not shrieked as did Miss Pelter whose top notes in the
church choir rasped Hunt's nerves like a cross-cut saw dragged through a
pine knot.
There was always a quarrel of some kind in that choir--the bickerings and
heart-burnings of his volunteer church choir were perennial.
Then, there was the feud over the Ditson pew--which branch of the
influential Ditson family should hold the chief seats in the church.
Hunt could not satisfy everybody. There was still a clique, even after
his two years' pastorate, who let it be frankly known that they had
desired to call Bardell, instead of him, to the pulpit of the First
Church.
These continued faultfindings and disputes were getting on Hunt's
nerves. And they must be affecting Betty--influencing her more than he
had heretofore considered.
This letter from Joe Hurley had come at a moment when Hunt was
desperately and completely out of tune with his environment. He had
brought to his first pastorate a modicum of enthusiasm which, during the
first year, had expanded into an earnest and purposeful determination to
do his duty as he saw it and to carry his congregation in spirit to the
heights he would achieve.
He--and they--had risen to a certain apex of spiritual experience through
the first months of his earnest endeavor, and then the cogs had begun to
slip. Suddenly Willett Ford Hunt's castles toppled and collapsed about
him. He found himself, half stunned, wholly mazed, wallowing in the
débris of his first church row, the renewed war over the Ditson pew.
Hunt had extricated himself from this cataclysm with difficulty, almost
like a man lifting himself off the earth by his bootstraps. The Ditson
feud was by no means at an end even now, and it never would be ended as
long as two Ditsons of different branches of the family remained alive.
Hunt had sought to renew his own and his congregation's spiritual life.
It was then and not until then that he discovered the fire was out.
Oh, for a church where one might preach as one pleased, so long as one
followed the spiritual instincts aroused by right living and a true
desire to help one's fellow men! That is what Hunt said he longed for.
But actually what he longed for is what perhaps we all long for whether
we know it or not--appreciation. Not fulsome praise, not a mawkishly
sentimental fawning flattery. He desired to feel that the understanding
heart of the community apprehended what he wished to do and respected
his effort though he might fall short of the goal.
There seemed to be no heart--understanding or otherwise--in Ditson
Corners. Why! A wild Western mining camp, such as Joe said Canyon Pass
was, could be no more ungrateful a soil to cultivate than this
case-hardened, hide-bound, self-centered and utterly uncharitable
Berkshire community.
The thought--not even audibly expressed--nevertheless shocked Hunt.
Hunt reached for the letter again. What had Joe said about there being a
field for religious endeavor in Canyon Pass? It was along in the first
part of the screed, and when he had found it he read:
Joshing aside, Willie, I believe you might dig down to the very
heart of Canyon Pass--and I believe it has a heart. You were such a
devil of a fellow for getting at the tap-root of a subject. If
anybody can electrify the moral fiber of Canyon Pass--as some of them
say I have the business part--it will be a man like you. You could do
the "Lazarus, arise!" stunt if anybody could--make the composite
moral man of Canyon Pass get up, put on a boiled shirt, and go forth
a decent citizen. And believe me, the composite figure of the moral
man here sadly needs such an awakening.
There was something that gripped Hunt in the rough and ready diction of
this letter--something that aroused his imagination. It brought to his
mind, too, a picture of Joe himself--a picture of both his physical and
his mental proportions.
The Reverend Willett Ford Hunt was no pigmy himself, nor did he lack
courage and vigor. He was good to look upon, dark without being sallow,
crowned with a thick brush of dull black hair--there were some brown
lights in it--possessing good features, keen gray eyes, broad shoulders,
a hundred and eighty pounds of gristle and flesh on a perfect bony
structure, and could look over a six-barred gate before he vaulted it.
He had not allowed his spiritual experiences, neither rising nor
falling, to interfere with his gymnastics or his daily walk.
But Joe Hurley topped Hunt by two inches, was broader, hardier, a wholly
out-of-door man. Joe was typically of the West and the wilderness. He
knew the open places and the tall timber, the mountains and the canyons,
the boisterous waters of cascade and rock-hemmed river. He was such an
entirely different being from Hunt that the latter had often wondered
why the Westerner had made such a chum and confidant of him during those
two years at college.
And now the pastor of Ditson Corners' First Church realized that Joe
Hurley had something that he wanted. He wished he was with Joe, out
there in that raw country. He felt that he could get nearer to mankind
out there and perhaps--he said it reverently--nearer to the God he humbly
desired to serve. He thought of Betty.
"She needs a change as much as I do. How does Joe guess that she is
becoming exactly a prim, repressed, narrow-thinking woman, and a Martha
cumbered by many cares? She needs her chance as much as I need mine."
He heard Betty's step on the porch, and in a moment she entered the
study, her hands full of those grateful mid-spring flowers, the lily of
the valley.
Betty Hunt was not a fragile girl, but she did not possess much of that
embonpoint the Greeks considered so necessary to beauty of figure. Nor
was she angular. At least, her grace of carriage and credibly tailored
frock masked any lack of flesh.
Slim hands she had, too,--beautiful hands, very white and with only a
faint tracery of blue veins upon them. Really, they were a musician's
hands--pliable, light of touch, but strong. The deftness with which they
arranged the flowers suggested that she did not need vision to aid in
the task.
Therefore she kept her gaze on Hunt. He felt it, turned, and smiled up
at her. He shook the leaves of the letter in his hand.
"Bet," he said, "I've got another letter from Joe Hurley."
Betty's countenance changed in a flash.
"Oh! That Westerner?"
There was more than disapproval in her tone. She looked away from him
quickly. Her own gray eyes filmed. A shocked, almost terrified
expression seemed to stiffen all her face. But Hunt did not see this.
"There is no use talking, Bet," her brother pursued in an argumentative
way, thoughtfully staring at the letter again. "There is no use talking.
Joe has it right. We are vegetating here. Most people in towns like
this, here in the East, might honestly be classified among the _flora_
rather than the _fauna_. We're like rows of cabbages in a kitchen
garden."
"Why, Ford!"
He grinned up at her--a suddenly recalled grimace of his boyhood.
"There speaks the cabbage, Bet! We're all alike--or most of us are. Here
in the old Commonwealth I mean. We're afraid to step aside from the
rutted path, to accept a new idea; really afraid to be and live out each
his own individuality.
"Ah! Out in this place Joe writes about----"
He fingered the sheets of the letter again. She watched with the slow
fading of all animation from her face--just as though a veil were drawn
across it by invisible fingers. Her expression was not so much one of
disapproval--her eyes held something entirely different in their depths.
Was it fear?
"This Canyon Pass is a real field for a man's efforts," burst out Hunt
with sudden exasperation. "I tell you, Bet, I feel as though my
usefulness here had evaporated. I haven't a thing in common with these
people. Carping criticism and little else confronts me whichever way I
turn."
"You--you are nervous, Ford."
"Nerves! What right has a man like me with nerves?" he demanded hotly.
"But, Ford--your work here?"
"Is a failure. Oh, yes. I can see better than you do, Bet--more
clearly--that I have lost my grip on these people."
"Surely there are other churches in the East that would welcome a man of
your talents."
"Aye! Another little hard-baked community in which I shall find exactly
the elements that have made my pastorate here a failure."
"You are not a failure!" she cried loyally.
"That's nice of you, Bet. You are a mighty good sister. But I am letting
you in for a share of the very difficulties that would soon put gray in
my hair and a stone in my bosom instead of a heart."
"Oh, Ford!"
"Out there--in some place like this Joe writes about--would be a new and
unplowed field. A place where a man could develop--grow, not vegetate."
"But--but must it necessarily be the West, Ford? I am not fond of the
West."
"You've never seen it."
"I'm not fond of Western people."
He looked at her with a dawning smile. "You're afraid of them, Bet."
"Yes. I am afraid of them," whispered his sister, turning her face away
from his gaze. "They are not our kind, Ford."
"That's exactly it," he cried, smiting the desk with the flat of his
palm. "We need to get out into the world, among people who are just as
different from 'our kind,' as you term them, as possible. There we can
expand. Out in Canyon Pass. I believe I could be a real help to that
community. What is it Joe says?" He glanced again at the letter before
him. "Yes! I might dig down to the very heart of Canyon Pass. Ditson
Corners has merely a pumping station to circulate the blood of the
community, patterned after the one at the reservoir on Knob Hill."
She did not speak again. When Hunt looked around she had stolen from the
room.
"Poor Bet!" he muttered. "The idea of change alarms her as it might have
alarmed Aunt Prudence. Joe Hurley is right--he's right beyond a doubt!"