Held to Answer: A Novel

by Peter Clark MacFarlane

In the end he won. The lawless element, sore and chastened, acknowledged their defeat, while the forces of good and evil alike recognized thus early the entry into the community of a man whose character and personality were henceforth to be reckoned with.

But while these battlings earned John publicity and high regard, they also won him hate and trouble. The work cost him tremendous expenditure of energy and sleepless nights. It made enemies of men whose friendship he desired. It brought him threats innumerable. A stick of dynamite was found beneath his study window. Yet John's devotion made him careless of personal danger. He trembled for Rose and Dick and Tayna; he trembled for the man who had crept through the shadow of the palms to plant that stick and time that fuse, which mercifully went out; but somehow he did not tremble for himself.

Besides, out of the shadow of danger, there seemed to reach sometimes the flexing muscles of an omnipotent arm. As, for instance, when an arrested gambler, out upon bail, came into his study one night with intent to kill. At first the minister was talking on the telephone, and some chivalric instinct restrained the would-be assassin from shooting his nemesis in the back.

Next John laughed at the preposterous idea of being killed, failing to understand that the threat was earnest or to perceive how much his caller was fired by liquor. Such merriment was unseemly to the man on murder bent; he found himself unable to shoot a bullet into the open mouth of laughter, and fumbled helplessly with his hand behind him and his tongue shamefacedly tied until the minister directed his mind aside with a question about his baby, following quickly with sympathetic talk about the man's wife and mother, until the spirit of vengeance went out of him, and he broke down and cried and went away meekly with a parting handshake from his intended victim.

It was only after the man had gone that John felt strangely weak with fright and bewildered by an odd sense of deliverance.

Yet all these battles were only a part of John's activities; nor did they grow out of a fighting spirit, but out of a sympathetic nature, out of his passion for the hurt and helpless, and his brave pity for the defenceless.

His impulsive boldness, his ready tact, and his disposition to follow an obligation or an opportunity through to the end, no matter where it led, had made him father confessor to men and women of every sort and the unofficial priest of a parish that extended widely on the surface and in the underworld of the life about him.

Naturally, All People's was extremely proud of its pastor, of his broad sympathies and his devoted activities. Impressionable ladies felt that there was something romantic in seeing him stand yonder in the pulpit, so grave and priestly; in seeing him come down at the end of the service, so approachable to all; and in taking his hand, not knowing whether some archcriminal had not wrung it an hour before he entered the pulpit, or whether last night those firm fingers might not have smoothed back the hair from the brow of some dying nameless woman in a place about which nice people could scarcely permit themselves to think.

There was even excitement in attending the church, because one never knew who would be sitting next,—some famous personage or some notorious one,—for Doctor Hampstead won his friends and admirers from the strangest sources imaginable.

As to pulpit eloquence, there was admittedly seldom a flash of it at All People's. By an enormous digestive feat, John had assimilated that seminary course of which the Dean had spoken, boasting that he read his Greek Testament entirely through in the three years, upon the street cars that plied between his home and the seat of theological learning. But this did not make of Hampstead a strong preacher, although the impression that he might be, if he chose, was unescapable. His passion, he declared, was not to preach the gospel but to do the gospel. People sat before him spellbound, not by his eloquence, but by a sense of mysterious spiritual forces at work about them. At times, the mere exhalations of the man's sunny personality seemed sufficient to account for all his influence; at others there was that mysterious feeling of the Presence.