Читать книгу The Heart of Canyon Pass - Holmes Thomas K. - Страница 2

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!”