John Wesley, Jr. Part 9

Marty rolled over on the sand in wordless glee.

"Aw, now, Marcia, why----" J.W., Jr., boggled, fairly caught, but soon recovering himself. "You must have been ashamed of it, then. I do remember something about your getting through, now you mention the fact, but why didn't I receive an invitation? Answer me that, young lady!"

"Oh, we educators don't think commencement amounts to so much as all that. With us, you know, life is real, life is earnest, and so forth.

But I'll tell you the truth, J.W. I knew you couldn't come, either of you, and I was saving up a little on commencement expenses; so I left you--and a good many others--off the list. I needed the money, that's the simple fact; And the reason you didn't see me at home last summer was because I was busy spending the money I had saved on your invitations and other expensive things."

Marty usually waited for J.W., but the idea which now occurred to him demanded utterance. "Say, Marcia, I think it's fine of you to be studying dispensary work and first aid."

"How did you know?" Marcia demanded.

"Never mind; I saw Joe Carbrook in Chicago when we went through on our way to the Buckland-Cartwright debate, and I guessed a good deal more than he told me, which wasn't much."

"Marty," said Marcia, her face aglow and her brave eyes looking into his, "there's nothing secret about it. When Joe gets through medical school we shall go out together to whatever field they choose for him.

The least I can do is to get ready to help."

"Is that why you've been going to training school?" asked J.W. They had so long been used to such complete frankness with each other that the question was "taken as meant."

"Yes, J.W., it is," said Marcia. "Joe has been doing perfectly splendid work in his medical course, and they say he will probably turn out to be a wonderful all-round doctor--everybody is surprised at his thoroughness, except me. I know what he means by it. But, of course, he has little time for training in other sorts of religious work, and so, ever since last June, I've been dividing my time between a settlement dispensary and the training school. Why shouldn't I be as keen on my preparation as he is on his, when we're going out to the same work?"

"You should, Marcia--you should," J.W. agreed, vigorously, "and we're proud of you; aren't we, Marty? I remember thinking two years ago what fine missionary pioneers you two would make. Only trouble is, we'll never know anything about it, after we've once seen your pictures in _The Epworth Herald_ among the recruits of the year. If you were only going where a feller could hope to visit you once every two years or so!"

Marcia looked out across the lake, but she wasn't seeing the white sails that glided along above the rippling blue of its waters. In a moment she pulled herself together, and observed that there had been enough talk about a mere visitor. "What of you two, now that your student occupation's gone?"

"Tell her about yourself, Marty," said J.W. "She knows what I'm going to do." And for the moment it seemed to him a very drab and unromantic prospect, in spite of his agreement with Mr. Drury that all service ranks alike with G.o.d.

Marty was always slow to talk of himself. "It isn't much," he said. "The district superintendent is asking me to fill out the year on the Ellis and Valencia Circuit--the present pastor is going to Colorado for his health. So I'm to be the young circuit-rider," and he smiled a wry little smile. He had no conceit of himself to make the appointment seem poor; rather he wondered how any circuit would consent to put up with a boy's crude preaching and awkward pastoral effort.

But J.W., Jr., was otherwise minded. A country circuit for Marty did not accord with his views at all. Marty was too good for a country church, he argued, mainly from his memories of the bare little one-room meetinghouse of his early childhood. In his periodical trips to the farm he had seen the old church grow older and more forlorn, as one family after another moved away, and the multiplying cars brought the town and its allurements almost to the front gate of every farm.

So J.W. had tried to say "No," for Marty, who would not say it for himself. It was one of the rare times when they did not see eye to eye.

But it made no difference in their st.u.r.dy affection; nothing ever could.

And Marty would take the appointment.

Commencement over, for the first time in many years the chums went their separate ways, Marty to his circuit, and J.W. home to Delafield. Then for a little while each had frequent dark-blue days, without quite realizing what made his world so flavorless. But that pa.s.sed, and the young preacher settled down to his preaching, and the young merchant to his merchandising; and soon all things seemed as if they had been just so through the years.

To J.W. came just one indication of the change that college had made.

Pastor Drury, though he found it wise to do much of his important work in secret, thought to make use of the college-consciousness which most towns possess in June, and which is felt especially, though not confessed, by the college colony. The year's diplomas are still very new in June. So a college night was announced for the social rooms, with a college sermon to follow on the next Sunday night. The League and the Senior Sunday School Department united to send a personal invitation to every college graduate in town, and to every student home for the vacation. They responded, four score of them, to the college-night call.

As J.W. moved about and greeted people he had known for years he began to realize that college has its own freemasonry. These other graduates were from all sorts of schools; two had been to Harvard, and one to Princeton; several were State University alumni. Cartwright was represented by nine, six of them undergraduates, and the others confessed themselves as being from Chicago, Syracuse, De Pauw, three or four sorts of "Wesleyan," Northwestern, Knox, Wabash, Western Reserve, and many more.

Not even all Methodist, by any means, J.W. perceived; and yet the fellowship among these strangers was very real. They spoke each other's tongue; they had common interests and common experiences. He told himself that here was a suggestion as to the new friends he might make in Delafield, without forgetting the old ones. And the prospect of life in Delafield began to take on new values.

On the next Sunday night not so many college people were out to hear Mr.

Drury's straight-thinking and plain-spoken sermon on "What our town asks of its college-trained youth"; and a few of those who came were inclined to resent what they called a lecture on manners and duty.

But to J.W. the sermon was precisely the challenge to service he had been looking for. It made up for his feeling at commencement that he was "out of it." It completed all which Mr. Drury had suggested at the Inst.i.tute camp fire four years ago, all that he himself had tried to say at the decision service on the day after the camp fire; all that the pastor had urged two years ago when J.W., Jr., confessed to him his new hesitations and uneasiness.

The pastor had not preached any great thing. He had simply told the college folk in his audience that no matter where they had gone to school, many people had invested much in them, and that the investment was one which in its very nature could not be realized on by the original investors. The only possible beneficiaries were either the successive college generations or the communities in which they found their place. If they chose to take as personal and unconditional all the benefits of their education, none could forbid them that anti-social choice; but if they accepted education as a trust, a stewardship, something to be used for the common good, they would be worth more to Delafield than all the new factories the Chamber of Commerce could coax to the town.

And to those who might be interested in this view of education, Pastor Drury said: "Young people of the colleges, you have been trained to some forms of laboratory work, in chemistry, in biology, in geology--yes, even in English. I invite you to think of your own town of Delafield as your living laboratory, in which you will be at once experimenters and part of the experiment stuff. Look at this town with all its good and evil, its dying powers and its new forces, its dullnesses and its enthusiasms, its folly and wisdom, its old ways and its new people, its wealth and want. Do you think it is already becoming a bit of the kingdom of G.o.d? Or, if you conclude that it seems to be going in ways that lead very far from the Kingdom, do you think it might possess any Kingdom possibilities? If you do, no matter what your occupation in Delafield, Delafield itself may be your true vocation, your call from G.o.d!"

For John Wesley Farwell, Jr., it was to become all of that.

CHAPTER IV

EXPLORING MAIN STREET

J.W., Jr., found small opportunity to make himself obnoxious by becoming a civic missionary before the time. He was busy enough with his adjustment to the business life of "Delafield and Madison county," this being the declared commercial sphere of the John W. Farwell Hardware Company. J.W. always had known hardware, but hitherto in a purely amateur and detached fashion. Now he lived with it, from tacks to tractors, ten or twelve hours a day. He found that being the son of his father gained him no safe conduct through the shop or with the customers. He had a lot to learn, even if he was John Wesley Farwell, Jr. That he was the heir apparent to all this array of cast iron and wrought and galvanized, of tin and wire and steel and aluminum and nickel, did not save him from aching back and skinned knuckles, nor from the various initiations staged by the three or four other employees.

But he was getting his bearings, and not from the store and the warehouse only. A good hardware store in a country town is a center of democracy for town and country alike. In what other place do farmers and artisans, country women and city women meet on so nearly equal terms?

Not in the postoffice, nor in the bank; and certainly not in the department store. But the hardware store's customers, men and women all, are masters of the tools they work with; and whoso loves the tools of his craft is brother to every other craftsman.

It was in the store, therefore, that J.W. began to absorb some of the knowledge and acquire some of the experiences that were to make his work something to his town.

For one thing, he got a new view of local geography, in terms of tools.

All the farmers from the bottoms of Mill Creek called for pretty much the same implements; the upland farms had different needs. The farmers'

wives who lived along the route of the creamery wagon had one sort of troubles with tinware; the women of the fruit farms another. J.W. knew this by the exchange of experiences he listened to while he sold milk strainers and canning outfits. He found out that the people on the edge of town who "made garden" were particular about certain tools and equipment which the wheat farmer would not even look at.

And the townpeople he learned to cla.s.sify in the same way. He was soon on good terms with those store clerks who were handy men about the house, with women who did all their own work, with blacksmiths and carpenters, with unskilled laborers and garage mechanics. In time he could almost tell where a man lived and what he did for a living, just by the hardware he bought and the questions he asked about it.

Heretofore J.W. had thought he knew most of the people in Delafield.

But the first weeks in the store showed him that he knew only a few. Up to this time "most of the people in Delafield" had meant, practically, his school friends, the clerks and salespeople in certain stores--and the members of the First Methodist Church.

That is to say, in the main, to him Delafield had been the church, and the church had been Delafield. But now he realized that his church was only a small part of Delafield. The town had other churches. It had lodges. When the store outfitted Odd Fellows' Hall with new window shades he learned that the Odd Fellows shared the place with strong lodges of the Maccabees and Modern Woodmen. And there were other halls.

J.W. Farwell, Sr., was a Mason, but these other lodges seemed to have as many members as the Masons, and one or the other of them was always getting ready for a big public display.

The same condition was true of the country people. He began to hear about the Farm Federation, and the Grange, and the Farmers' Elevator, and the cooperative creamery, for members of all of these groups pa.s.sed in and out of the store.

One day J.W. remarked to the pastor who had dropped into the store: "Mr.

Drury, I never noticed before how this place is alive with societies and clubs and lodges and things. Everybody seems to belong to three or four organizations. And they talk about 'em! But I don't hear much about our church, and nothing at all about the old church out at Deep Creek. Yet I used to think that the church was the whole thing!"

The older man nodded. "It's true, J.W.," he said, "all the churches together are only a small part of the community. They are the best, and usually the best-organized forces we have, I'm sure of that; but the church and the town have to reckon with these others."

"What good are they all? They must cost a pile of money. What for?"

"That's what you might call a whale of a question, J.W." John W.

Farwell, Senior, who had been standing by, listening, essayed to answer.

"And you haven't heard yet of all the organizations. Look at me, for example. I belong to the Chamber of Commerce and the Rotary Club. I'm on the Executive Committee of the Madison County Horticultural Society, and I've just retired from the Board of Directors of the Civic League. Then you must think of the political parties, and the County Sunday School a.s.sociation, and the annual Chautauqua, and I don't know what all."

"Yes, and I notice, dad, that a good many of these," said J.W., Jr., "are just for the men. The women must have nearly as many. Why, Delafield ought to be a model town, and the country 'round here ought to be a regular paradise, with all these helpers and uplifters on the job.

But it isn't. Maybe they're not all on the job."

"That's about it, my boy," his father agreed "I sometimes think we need just one more organization--a society that would never meet, but between the meetings of all the other societies would actually get done the things they talk about and pa.s.s resolutions about and then go off and forget until the next meeting."

"Well, dad, what I want to find out," J.W. said, as he started off with Mr. Drury to the post office, "is where the church heads in. Mr. Drury is sure it has a big responsibility, and maybe it has. But what is it willing to do and able to do, and what will the town let it do? It seems to me that is the question."

J.W. heard his father's voice echoing after him up the street, "Sure, that is the question," and Mr. Drury added, "Three questions in one."