THE TRUMPET-CALL
For the first few vacation days Tom rose with the sun and lived with the industries, marking all the later expansive strides and sorrowing keenly that he had not been present to see them taken in detail.
But this was a passing phase. When the mechanical hunger was sated; when he had started and stopped every engine in the big plant, had handled the levers of the great steam-hoist that shot the coal-cars from the mine to the coke-yard bins, and had prevailed on the engineer of the dinkey engine to let him haul out and dump a pot of slag, he had a sharp relapse into the primitive, and went roaming afield in search of his lost boyhood.
It was not to be found in any of the valley haunts, these having been transformed by the country-house colony. The old water-wheel below the dam hung motionless, being supplanted by the huge, modern, blowing-engines; and the black wash from the coal-mines had driven the perch from the pools and spoiled the swimming-holes in the creek. In the farther forests of the rampart hills the chopper's ax had been busy; and the blackberry patches in all the open spaces were sacked daily by chattering swarms of the work-people's children, white and black.
On the third morning Tom turned his steps despairingly toward the slopes of the mountain. He was at a pass when he would have given worlds to find one of the sacred places undesecrated. And there remained now only the high altar under the cedars of Lebanon to be visited.
It comforted him not a little to find that he had the old-time, burning thirst when he came within earshot of the dripping spring under the great rock. But when he would have knelt to drink from his palms like Gideon's men, there was no pool in the rocky basin. A barrel had been sunk in the sand-filled crevice, and a greedy pipe-line sucked up the water as fast as it trickled from the rock, to pass it on to one of the thirsty mechanisms in the iron plant a thousand feet below.
In its way this was the final straw, and Tom sat down beside the utilized spring with a lump in his throat. Afterward, he slaked his thirst as he could at the trickle from the rock's lip, and then set his face toward the higher steeps. Major Dabney,—not yet fully in tune with his new neighbors of the country-house colony,—and his granddaughter were spending the summer at Crestcliffe Inn, the new hotel on top of the mountain, and Tom felt that Ardea would understand if he could find and tell her. There are times when one must find a sympathetic ear, or be rent and torn by the pent-up things within.
In one sense the sympathy quest was a devitalizing failure. When he reached the summit of the mountain, hot and tired and dusty, the mere sight of the great hotel, with its thronged verandas and its overpowering air of grandeur and exclusiveness, quenched all desires save that which prompted a hasty retreat. The sectarian school paid as little attention to the social as to the athletic side of its youth; and Tom Gordon at fifteen past was as helpless conventionally as if he had never set foot outside of Paradise.
But at the retractive moment he ran plump into the Major, stalking grandly along the tile-paved walk and smoking a war-time cheroot of preposterous length. The despot of Paradise, despot now only by courtesy of the triumphant genius of modernity, put on his eye-glasses and stared Thomas into respectful rigidity.
"Why, bless my soul!—if it isn't Captain Gordon's boy! Well, well, you young limb! If you didn't faveh youh good fatheh in eve'y line and lineament of youh face, I should neveh have known you—you've grown so. Shake hands, suh!"
Tom did it awkwardly. It is a gift to be able to shake hands easily; a gift withheld from most girls and all boys up to the soulful age. But there was worse to follow. Ardea was somewhere on the peopled verandas, and the Major, more terrible in his hospitality than he had ever appeared in the old-time rage-fits, dragged his hapless victim up and down and around and about in search of her. "Not say 'Howdy' to Ardea? Why, you young cub, where are youh mannehs, suh?" Thus the Major, when the victim would have broken away.
It was a fiery trial for Tom—a way-picking among red-hot plowshares of embarrassment. How the well-bred folk smiled, and the grand ladies drew their immaculate skirts aside to make passing-room for his dusty feet! How one of them wondered, quite audibly, where in the world Major Dabney had unearthed that young native! Tom was conscious of every fleck of dust on his clothes and shoes; of the skilless knot in his necktie; of the school-desk droop in his shoulders; of the utter superfluousness of his big hands.
And when, at the long last, Ardea was discovered sitting beside a gorgeously-attired Queen of Sheba, who also smiled and examined him minutely through a pair of eye-glasses fastened on the end of a gold-mounted stick, the place of torment, wherever and whatever it might be, held no deeper pit for him. What he had climbed the mountain to find was a little girl in a school frock, who had sat on the yellowing grass with one arm around the neck of a great dog, looking fearlessly up at him and telling him she was sorry he was going away. What he had found was a very statuesque little lady, clad in fluffy summer white, with the other Ardea's slate-blue eyes and soft voice, to be sure, but with no other reminder of the lost avatar.
From first to last, from the moment she made room for him, dusty clothes and all, on the settee between herself and the Queen of Sheba, Tom was conscious of but one clearly-defined thought—an overmastering desire to get away—to be free at any cost. But the way of escape would not disclose itself, so he sat in stammering misery, answering Ardea's questions about the sectarian school in bluntest monosyllables, and hearing with his other ear a terrible Major tell the Queen of Sheba all about the railroad invasion, and how he—Tom Gordon—had run to find a punk match to fire a cannon in the Dabney cause.
All of which was bad enough, but the torture rack had still another turn left in its screw. After he had sat for awkward hours, as it seemed, though minutes would have measured it, there was a stir on the veranda and he became vaguely conscious of an impending catastrophe.
"Grandpa is telling you you must stay to luncheon with us," prompted Ardea. "Will you take me in?"
The Major had already given his arm to the Queen of Sheba, and there was no help for the helpless. Tom crooked his arm as stiffly as possible and said "May I?"—which was an inspiration—and they got to the great dining-room with no worse mishap than a collision at the door brought about by his stepping on the train of one of the grand ladies.
But at luncheon his troubles began afresh; or rather, a new and more agonizing set of them took the field. The fourth seat at the small table was occupied by the lady with the stick eye-glasses, and Tom was made aware that she was a Dabney cousin once removed. Thereupon, what little dexterity was left in him fled away, and the table-trial, under the smiling eyes of a Miss Euphrasia, became a chapter of horrors.
From absently picking and choosing among the forks, and trying to drink his bouillon out of the cup in which it was served, to upsetting his glass of iced tea, he stumbled on in a dream of awkwardness; and when, to cover the tea mishap, Ardea, emulating the lady hostess who broke one of her priceless tea-cups at a similar crisis, promptly overturned her own glass, he was unreasonable enough to be angry.
Taking it all in all, anger was coming to be the one constant quantity in the procession of varying emotions. By what right did this hollow, insincere, mocking world, of whose very existence he had been in utter ignorance, make him a butt for its well-bred sneers? Its fashions and fripperies and meaningless forms were not beyond learning; and, by Heaven! he would learn them, too, and put them all to shame. They should see!
And Ardea: was she laughing at him, too, in the depths of her big, beautiful eyes? No, that was too much; he would never believe that. But she was insincere, like the rest of them. It was acting a lie for her to make-believe clumsiness just to keep the others from laughing at him. She must stand with her kind.
From that station to the top of the high, bare crag of righteous condemnation was but a short stage in the wrathful journey; and while he was choking over the meal of strange dishes the zealous under-thought was reaching out into the future.
Some day, when his tongue should be loosed, he would stand before this mocking, smiling, heathenish world with the open Bible in his hand; then it should be taught what it needed to know—that while it was saying it was rich, and increased with goods, and had need of nothing, it was wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked.
So it came about that it was the convert of Little Zoar, and not the self-pitying youth searching for his lost boyhood, who escaped finally from the entanglements of Major Dabney's hospitality.
On the way down the cliff path the fire burned and the revival zeal was kindled anew. There had been times, in the last year, especially, when he had thought coldly of the disciple's calling and was minded to break away and be a skilled craftsman, like his father. Now he was aghast to think that he had ever been so near the brink of apostasy. With the river of the Water of Life springing crystal clear at his feet, should he turn away and drink from the bitter pools in the wilderness of this world? With prophetic eye he saw himself as another Boanerges, lifting, with all the inspiring eloquence of the son of thunder, the Baptist's soul-shaking cry, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!
The thought thrilled him, and the fierce glow of enthusiasm became an intoxicating ecstasy. The tinkling drip of falling water broke into the noonday silence of the forest like the low-voiced call of a sacred bell. For the first time since leaving the mountain top he took note of his surroundings. He was standing beside the great, cubical boulder under the cedars—the high altar in nature's mountain tabernacle.
Ah, Martha Gordon, mother of many prayers, look now, if you can, but not too closely or too long! Is it merely the boy you have molded and fashioned, or is it the convinced and consecrated evangelist of the future, who falls on his knees beside the great rock, with head bent and fingers tightly interlocked, groping desperately for words in which to rededicate himself to the God of your fathers?
Thomas Jefferson had the deep peace of the fully committed when he rose from his knees and went to drink at the spouting rock lip. It was decided now, this thing he had been holding half-heartedly in abeyance. There would be no more dallying with temptation, no more rebellion, no more irreverent stumblings in the dark valley of doubtful questions. More especially, he would be vigilant to guard against those backslidings that came so swiftly on the heels of each spiritual quickening. His heart was fixed, so irrevocably, so surely, that he could almost wish that Satan would try him there and then. But the enemy of souls was nowhere to be seen in the leafy arches of the wood, and Tom bent again to take a second draft at the spouting rock lip.