“Beg pardon, but here’s a gentleman to see you, Mr. Craighill.”
With the glass half raised, Wayne turned impatiently to greet a short man who stood smiling at the door.
“Hello, Craighill!”
“Jimmy Paddock!” blurted Wayne.
The odour of whiskey was keen on the air and Wayne’s hand shook with the eagerness of his appetite; but the fool of a clerk had surprised him at a singularly inopportune moment. He slowly lowered the glass to the desk, his eyes upon his caller, who paused on the threshold for an instant, then strode in with outstretched hand.
“That delightful chauffeur of yours told me you were here and I thought I wouldn’t wait for a better chance to look you up. Had to come into town on an errand—was waiting for the trolley—recognized your man and here I am! Well!”
The glass was at last safe on the desk and Wayne, still dazed by the suddenness with which his thirst had been defrauded, turned his back upon it and greeted Paddock coldly. The Reverend James Paddock had already taken a chair, with his face turned away from the bottle, and he plunged into lively talk to cover Craighill’s embarrassment. They had not met for five years, and then it had been by mere chance in Boston, when they were both running for trains that carried one to the mountains and the other to the sea. Their ways had parted definitely when they left their preparatory school, Wayne to enter the “Tech,” Paddock to go to Harvard. Wayne was not in the least pleased to see this old comrade of his youth: there was a wide gulf of time to bridge and Wayne shrank from the effort of flinging his memory across it. As Paddock unbuttoned his topcoat, Wayne noted the clerical collar—noted it, it must be confessed, with contempt. He remembered Paddock as a rather silent boy, but the young minister talked eagerly with infinite good spirits, chuckling now and then in a way that Wayne remembered. As his resentment of the intrusion passed, some reference to their old days at St. John’s awakened his curiosity as to one or two of their classmates and certain of the masters, and Wayne began to take part in the talk.
Jimmy Paddock had been a homely boy, and the years had not improved his looks. His skin was very dark, and his hair black, but his eyes were a deep, unusual blue. A sad smile somehow emphasized the plainness of his clean-shaven face. He spoke with a curious rapidity, the words jumbling at times, and after trying vaguely to recall some idiosyncrasy that had set the boy apart, Wayne remembered that Paddock had stammered, and this swift utterance with its occasional abrupt pauses was due to his method of conquering the difficulty. Behind the short, well-knit figure Wayne saw outlined the youngster who had been the wonder of the preparatory school football team for two years, and later at Harvard the hero of the ’Varsity eleven. There was no question of identification as to the physical man; but the boy he had known had led in the wildest mischief of the school. He distinctly recollected occasions on which Jimmy Paddock had been caned, in spite of the fact that he belonged to a New England family of wealth and social distinction. Paddock, with his chair tipped back and his hands thrust into his pockets, volunteered answers to some of the questions that were in Wayne’s mind.
“You see, Craighill, when I got out of college my father wanted me to go into the law, but I tried the law school for about a month and it was no good, so I chucked it. The fact is, I didn’t want to do anything, and I used to hit it up occasionally and paint things to assert my independence of public opinion. It was no use; couldn’t get famous that way; only invited the parental wrath. Then a yellow newspaper printed a whole page of pictures of American degenerates, sons of rich families, and would you believe it, there I was, like Abou Ben Adhem, leading all the rest! It almost broke my mother’s heart, and my father stopped speaking to me. It struck in on me, too, to find myself heralded as a common blackguard, so I went into exile—way up in the Maine woods and lived with the lumber-jacks. Up there I met Paul Stoddard. He’s the head of the Brothers of Bethlehem who have a house over here in Virginia. The brothers work principally among men—miners, sailors, lumbermen. It’s a great work and Stoddard’s a big chap, as strong as a bull, who knows how to get close to all kinds of people. I learned all I know from Stoddard. One night as I lay there in my shanty it occurred to me that never in my whole stupid life had I done anything for anybody. Do you see? I wasn’t converted, in the usual sense”—his manner was wholly serious now, and he bent toward Wayne with the sad little smile about his lips—“I didn’t feel that God was calling me or anything of that kind; I felt that Man was calling me: I used to go to bed and lie awake up there in the woods and hear the wind howling and the snow sifting in through the logs, and that idea kept worrying me. A lot of the jacks got typhoid fever, and there wasn’t a doctor within reach anywhere, so I did the best I could for them. For the first time in my life I really felt that here was something worth doing, and it was fun, too. Stoddard went from there down to New York to spend a month in the East Side and I hung on to him—I was afraid to let go of him. He gave me things to do, and he suggested that I go into the ministry—said my work would be more effective with an organization behind me—but I ducked and ducked hard. I told him the truth, about what I didn’t believe, this and that and so on; but he put the thing to me in a new way. He said nobody could believe in man who didn’t believe in God, too! Do you get the idea? Well, I was a long time coming to see it that way.
“It was no good going home to knock around and no use discussing such a thing with my family, and I knew people would think me crazy. Stoddard was going West, to do missionary stunts in Michigan, where there were more lumber camps, so I went along. I used to help him with the lumber-jacks, and try to keep the booze out of them; and first thing I knew he had me reading and getting ready for orders; he said I’d better keep clear of divinity schools; and I guess he had figured it out that if I got too much divinity I would get scared and back water. Then I went home and broke the news to the family. They didn’t take much stock in it; they thought I would take a tumble and be a worse disgrace than ever. But there was plenty of money and I had no head for business, anyhow, and there was a chance that I might become respectable, so I got ordained very quietly three years ago at a mission away up on Lake Superior where a bishop had taken an interest in me—and here I am.”