John Wesley, Jr. Part 15

"Not quite," replied Marty; "we can't. We're too busy growing the food for you town folks. But we keep up a pretty stiff pace, for the preacher; I have no time hanging on my hands."

"I should think not," J.W. commented, "if you try to run everything.

Mr. Drury always seems to have lots of time, just because he makes the rest of us run the works in Delafield First."

"Oh, he does, does he?" said Marty, shortly, who knew something of the older minister's strategy. "That's according to how you look at it. I'm not above learning from him, and I don't run everything, either. But I'm there, or thereabouts, most of the time."

"How do you get time for your study and your sermons, then," queried J.

W., "if you're on the go so much?"

Marty turned a quizzical look at J.W. "My beloved chum, how did you and I get time for our studies at Cartwright?" he said. "Besides, I'm making one hand wash the other. The social life here, for instance, used to be pretty bad, before Henderson came--that's the preacher whose place I took. It was pulling away from the church; now it draws to the church.

Henderson started that. The people who are my main dependence in the other affairs are mostly the same people I can count on in the Sunday school and League and the preaching service. The more we do the better it is for what we do Sundays."

"Then, there's another Because these people and I know one another so well, I couldn't put on airs in the pulpit if I wanted to. I've just got to preach straight, and I won't preach a thing I can't back up myself. I use country ill.u.s.trations; show them their own world. It's one big white mark for the Farwell farm, as you might suppose, that I know the best side of country life, though I don't advertise your real estate."

"I know," said J.W. "But don't you find country people pretty hard to manage? That's our experience at the store. They are particular and critical, and think they know just what they want."

"They do too," Marty a.s.serted, "Why shouldn't they? I believe I can tell you one big difference between the city boy and the country. You've been both; see if I'm right. The country boy minds his folks, and his teacher. But everything else minds him. He is boss of every critter on the place, from the hens to the horses, whenever he has anything to do with them at all. So he learns to think for them, as well as for himself. In the city the boy has no chance to give orders--he's under orders, all the time; the traffic cop, the truant officer, the boss in the shop or the office, the street car conductor, the janitor--everybody bosses him and he bosses nothing, except his kid brothers and sisters.

So he may come to be half cringer and half bully. The country boy is not likely to be much afraid, and he soon learns that if he tries to boss even the boys without good reason it doesn't pay. Maybe that's the reason so many country boys make good when they go to the city."

"And the reason why a city boy like me," suggested J.W., "would be a misfit in the country."

"Oh, you," scoffed Marty. "You don't count. You're a half-breed. But, as I meant to say, you're right about country folks. They are a little close, maybe. They are more independent in their business than town people, but they learn how to work together; they exchange farm work, and work the roads, and they are fairly dependent on one another for all social life."

"On Deep Creek the tenant farmers are the biggest difficulty, your dad told me last Sunday," said J.W. "They go to town when they go anywhere, and not to church, either."

"I know," said Marty. "And I don't much blame 'em, from all I hear. But Henderson changed that considerably in this community. He found out that the tenants were just as human as the others, only they had the idea that n.o.body cared about them, because they might be here to-day and gone to-morrow. And, what do you think? I find tenant farmers around here are beginning to take longer leases; one or two are about like dad's been with your father--more partners than anything else. Every renter family in this neighborhood comes to our church, and only three or four fight shy of us at Valencia."

"All right," said J.W., drowsily. "Go to sleep now; I've got to inspect that Holstein hotel in the morning, and I know what country hours are."

The next day J.W. drove off toward the big barns of his customer, and left Marty deep in the mysteries of Sunday's sermon. Marty was yet a very young preacher, and one sermon a week was all he could manage, as several of his admirers had found out to his discomfiture, when one Sunday they followed him from Ellis in the morning to Valencia at night.

But the "twicers" professed to enjoy it.

J.W.'s farmer was quite ready to talk about the new barn equipment and how it was working, and he had remarkably few complaints, these more for form's sake than anything else. That business was soon out of the way.

But Farmer Bellamy was interested in other things besides ventilators and horse-forks.

"So you're a friend of our preacher," he said, in the questioning affirmative of the deliberate country. "Well, he's quite a go-ahead young fellow; you never get up early enough to find him working in a cold collar. Maybe he's a mite ambitious, but I don't know."

J.W., as always, came promptly to Marty's defense. "He's not ambitious for himself, Mr. Bellamy; I'll vouch for that. But I shouldn't wonder he is ambitious about his work, and maybe that's not a bad thing for a country preacher in these days."

"That's so," Mr. Bellamy a.s.sented. "But I doubt we keep him. He'll be getting a church in town before long."

Now J.W. had no instructions from Marty, but he thought he might venture. And he had been introduced to a few ideas that he had never met in the days when he objected to Marty's taking a country circuit.

"I'll tell you something, Mr. Bellamy," he said. "Marty is a farmer's boy who loves the country. If he has the right sort of backing, I shouldn't wonder he stayed here a good long time. He's got enough plans ahead for this circuit of his."

Mr. Bellamy laughed. "He has that; if he waits to get 'em all going we're sure of him for a while. Why, he wants to make the church the most important business in the whole neighborhood; and, what's more, he's getting some of us to see it that way too."

"Yes, I guess that's his dream," J.W. said. "And it's so much better than the reality up around where I used to live that I wouldn't head him off if I were you."

"Head him off!" Mr. Bellamy laughed again. "Why, do you know what he did in the fall, when some of us told him we couldn't do much for missions?

He phoned all over the neighborhood the day before he set out with a ton-and-a-half truck he had hired for the job. Told us to put into the truck anything we could spare. And what do you think? Before night he drove into Hill City with a big overload, even for that truck, of wheat, corn, b.u.t.ter, eggs, chickens, sausage, apples, potatoes, and dear knows what. Sold the lot for sixty-nine dollars. He paid nine dollars for the truck--got a rate on it--and turned in for missions sixty dollars. We've never given more than twenty, in cash."

"But that wasn't all. Next Sunday he reported, and before any of us could say 'Praise the Lord!' says he, 'Don't think the Lord's giving any of us much credit for that stuff. We owe him a good deal more than a few eggs that we'll never miss. I just wanted to show you that when we country people really start paying our t.i.the to the Almighty our missionary and other offerings will make that truckload look like the crumbs from our tables. I've proved that we're rich, instead of being too poor to provide for missions. And it's all our Father's, you know.

When we pay him our t.i.the we admit that in the only practical way,'

Funny thing was the whole business had been so queer, n.o.body got mad over his plain talk. Some of us have begun to t.i.the, and to enjoy it.

Yes; that young feller is quite a go-ahead young feller."

J.W. rather admired the tale of the truck; it was like Marty, right enough, to get his t.i.thing talk ill.u.s.trated with a load of produce; but there was more than a hint of a new Marty, with a new directness and confidence.

So he asked, "What else is he doing that's making a difference?"

And the floodgates were lifted. The Bellamy gift of utterance had a congenial theme. For an hour the stream ran strong and steady, and when it would have stopped none could tell. But J.W. remembered he had promised to be back with Marty for dinner, and so, in the midst of a story about Marty's Sat.u.r.day afternoon outings with the boys, highly reminiscent of their own old-time Sat.u.r.days in the Deep Creek timber, J.W. made his excuses and hurried away.

In that hour he had heard of the observing of special days, Thanksgiving and Christmas particularly; of the rage for athletic equipment on every farm which had youngsters, so that the usual anaemic croquet outfit had given place to basketball practice sets, indoor-outdoor ball, volley-ball nets, and other paraphernalia. Some of it not much used now, since winter had come, but under Marty's leadership, a skating rink construction gang had thrown up a dirt embankment in a low spot near the creek and then cut a channel far enough upstream to flood about four acres of swamp. Mr. Bellamy told about the skating tournaments every afternoon of the cold weather for the school children, and Sat.u.r.day afternoons for the older young folks. More people went than skated too, the garrulous farmer a.s.serted. It was just another of that young preacher's sociability schemes, and there was no end to 'em, seemed like to him.

There was even more on the business side of country life: how Marty had joined forces with the Grange and the county agent and the cooperators of the creamery and the elevator and the school teachers. And so on, and so on.

J.W. would be the last to worry about such a program; it just fitted his ideas. But it made him a little more interested in the Sunday services. Would Marty's preaching match his community work?

But before Sunday morning came J.W. had other questions to ask. He put them to Marty in intervals of the skating races; and again after supper, before going over to the church to meet a little group of Sunday-school folk--"my teacher-partners" Marty called them--who were learning with him how to adapt Sunday school science and the teaching art to the conditions of the open country.

All of J.W.'s questions were really one big question: "Say, Marty, boy, I always knew you had something in you that didn't show on the surface, but I never thought it was exactly the stuff they need to make up-to-date country preachers. How does it happen that you've blossomed out in these few months as a Moses to lead a 'rural parish'--if that's the right scientific name--out of such a wilderness as I saw at Deep Creek last Sunday?"

Marty made a pa.s.s at his chum in the fashion of the Cartwright days, and waited for the return punch before answering. "Don't you 'Moses' me, John Wesley. Besides, this circuit was no wilderness. Henderson, the preacher who was here before me, was just the man for this work. He knew the country, and believed it had the makings of even more attractive life than the town. Too bad he had to quit. But he started these folks thinking the right way. And then, don't you remember I wrote last summer that I was spending two weeks at a school for rural ministers?"

"Oh, yes, I remember that," J.W. answered, "but that's no explanation. I spent four years at a college for town and country boys, and now look at me! Two weeks is a little too short a course to produce miracles, even with such an intellect as yours, notwithstanding your name is bigger than mine, Martin Luther! Now, if you'd said four weeks, I might almost have believed you, but two weeks--well, it just isn't done, that's all!"

"Make fun of it, will you!" said Marty, with another short-arm jab.

"Now, listen to me. That thing is simple enough. First off, I'd been thinking four years about being a preacher. On top of that, I'd been a country boy for twenty-three years. I know the Deep Creek neighborhood better than you do, because I had to live there. You were just visiting the farm your father paid taxes on. When I came here I found that Henderson had set things going. He told me what his dream was. So, when I went to that two-weeks' school I was ready to take in every word and see every picture and get a grip on every principle. Maybe you don't know that it was one of many such schools set up by the rural work leaders of our Home Missions Board, and it was a great school. They had no use for rocking-chair ruralists, so the faculty, instead of being made up of paper experts, was a bunch of men who _knew_. It was worth a year of dawdling over text-books. You see, I knew I could come back here and try everything on my own people. It was like the Squeers school in 'Nicholas Nickleby,' 'Member? When the spelling cla.s.s was up, Squeers says to Smike, the big, helpless dunce, 'Spell window,'" And Smike says, 'W-i-n-d-e-r,' 'All right,' Squeers says, 'now go out and wash 'em,'

Well, I hope I got the spelling a little nearer right, but I came home and began washing my windows. That's all.

J.W. said "Huh!" and that stood for understanding, and approval, and confidence.

As to Marty's preaching, it was a boy's preaching, naturally, but it was preaching. And the people came for it; J.W., remarked to himself the contrast between the close-parked cars around Ellis church and the forlornly vacant horse-sheds he had seen at Deep Creek the Sunday before.

The hearty singing of people glad to be singing together, the contagious interest of a well-filled house, and the simple directness of the preacher were all of a piece. Here was no effort to ape the forms of a cathedral, but neither was there any careless, cheap slovenliness. And a.s.suredly there were no religious "stunts."

Marty preached the Christian evangel, not moralized agriculture. He made the gospel invitation a social appeal, without blinking its primary message to the individual to place himself under the authority of Christ's self-forgetting love. He put first things in front--"Him that cometh unto me," and then with simple ill.u.s.trations and words as simple he showed that they who had accepted Christ's lordship were honor bound to live together under a new sort of law from that of the restless, pushing, self-centered world: "It shall not be so among you." Besides, he told them they could not separate service from profit. They knew, for instance, that their farm values were a third higher because of the presence of the church and its work, but they would find that the profit motive was not big enough to keep the church going. They had to love the work, and do it for love of it.

That afternoon the friends drove over to Valencia, where at night Marty would preach again this his one sermon of the week; and J.W. left him there, turning his car homeward for the fifty-two miles to Delafield.

As they parted, J.W. gripped Marty's hand and said: "Old man, I own up.

I thought you ought not to bury yourself in the country, but I had no need to worry. I know preachers who are buried in town all right; you have a bigger field and a livelier one than they will ever find. And I'll never say another word about your two-weeks' school. If the Home Missions Board had nothing else to do, such work as it showed you how to do would be worth all the Board costs. I'm going to make trouble for Mr.

Drury and the district superintendent and the bishop and the Board and anybody else I can get hold of, until Deep Creek gets the same sort of chance as this circuit of yours. If only they knew where to find another Martin Luther Shenk--that's the rub!" And with a last handclasp the chums went their separate ways.

On Monday J.W. called up Pastor Drury and gave that gentleman, who was expecting it, a five-minute summary of his day with Marty. "I'm awfully glad I happened to think of going over there," he said, "not only for the sake of being with the old boy again, but because I've got some new notions about the country church, and about what we Methodists are beginning to do for the places where Methodism got its start."