REVEREND THORN, as soon as his interrogations at Yale College were completed, hurried back to Boston and caught the stage running out to Marlboro, Massachusetts, to make inquiries as to the character and prospects of Abner Hale. Even as the coach neared Marlboro, he felt his old distaste for the village returning. The smug white barns in the smug spring landscape bespoke generations of thrifty, cautious people, proud of their possessions and deaf to the teachings of the Lord. His earlier impressions were fortified when he found the townspeople as smug as the outlying barns.
The school principal reported, airily: “Abner Hale! Ah, yes! There are so many Hale children it’s rather difficult to keep them separated in one’s mind. Abner, stringy hair, no good in games, worse in math, but rather gifted in the verbal processes that mark the cultivated mind. An austere young man who never pared his nails. Had good teeth, though.”
“Was he pious?” Thorn pressed.
“To a fault,” the airy schoolteacher replied. Then, sensing that this could be construed by his visitor to be a slur against piety, he quickly added, “By that I mean he was inclined toward priggishness, which I hold to be a fault, for does not the Bible counsel us: ‘Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savor: so doth a little folly him that is in reputation for wisdom and honor’?” And he held his hands up and smiled ingratiatingly.
“Would he make a good missionary?” Thorn asked in some anger, for he had been unable to follow the Biblical citation.
“Ah, yes!” the teacher cried. “To plunge into the unknown. To carry the good Word to the heathen. Yes, I think Abner Hale … Do I have the right boy? He was Gideon Hale’s oldest? Bad complexion … really, an unlovely child? Yes, that’s the one. Oh, yes! He’d make a fine missionary. Likes odd places and being alone.”
The local minister was no better, and Reverend Thorn, schooled in the hard fields of Africa, could quickly spot where Abner had learned to weep. The doddering old man wheezed: “Little Abner Hale! I remember the year he found the Lord. It was in his father’s meadow, and he stood transfixed …”
“Would he make a good missionary?” Thorn interrupted.
“Missionary!” the old man snapped. “Why should he leave Marlboro? Why not come back here and take my place, where he could do some good? Somebody ought to send some missionaries to Marlboro. Atheism, Deism, Unitarianism, Quakerism. Pretty soon there won’t be a decent follower of John Calvin in all New England. If you want my opinion, young man, and I can see by your red face that you don’t, you oughtn’t to be coming here seducing our young men to go to Ceylon and Brazil and such places. Let ’em stay here and do some missionary work. But I haven’t answered your question. Abner Hale’d make a wonderful missionary. He’s gentle yet obstinate in the right. He’s hard-working yet poetic in his love of nature. He’s pious and he respects his parents. He’s much too good to be sent to Ceylon.”
On the dusty walk to the Hale farm, Reverend Thorn just about decided to give up his complex plan of first convincing the Board that they ought to take Abner and then convincing his niece Jerusha that she should do the same. All he had so far heard about the boy confirmed his committee’s suspicions that Abner was a difficult, opinionated young man who was bound to cause trouble wherever he went, but then the gaunt missionary came upon the home of Abner Hale, and his mind was quickly changed.
From the road a line of maples led along a narrow lane to a wandering New England farmhouse with barn attached. For nearly a hundred and fifty years the buildings had known no paint and now stood grayish brown in the New England sun, which instead of brightening what could have been a lovely grassed-in square served instead to underscore the bleakness of the buildings. It was, recalled Reverend Thorn, the kind of Christian house in which he had been raised, the archetype in which to produce true piety. He understood Abner better from having seen merely the harsh outlines of his home.
Gideon Hale, angular and hard, completed the picture. Wrapping his skinny left leg completely around his right, so that one ankle locked into the other, he put his guest at ease by saying, “If you take Abner for Owhyhee you aren’t getting an unmixed blessing, Reverend Thorn. He’s not an average boy. He’s not too easy to handle, either. He was pretty reasonable until he found conversion. Then he was certain that it was he and not me that was to interpret God’s will. But he has enormous character. If you saw his marks in the Marlboro School, you’d find he started out poor in figures. But have you seen what he accomplished at Yale College? Only the best. In many ways he’s an indifferent boy, Reverend Thorn, but where the right is concerned he’s a rock. All my children are.”
At supper Eliphalet Thorn saw the kind of granite from which Abner had been hewn. The nine little Hales, with no dirt on their faces and dressed in the cheapest kind of homespun, filed dutifully in and sat at a table marked by spotless cleanliness and very little food. “We will say prayers,” wiry, hawk-eyed Gideon announced, and all heads were bowed. One by one the nine children recited appropriate verses from the Bible, after which Mrs. Hale, an almost dead bundle of bones, mumbled briefly, “God bless this house,” which was followed by a five-minute prayer from her husband. These preliminaries over, Hale said, “And now will our guest consent to bless us with a word of prayer?” And the scene was so reminiscent of his own childhood that Reverend Thorn launched into a ten-minute blessing in which he recalled the pious highlights of his youth in a Christian family.
After the meager meal Gideon Hale took his entire brood into the front room, where a particularly dank smell proved that no fire was ever wasted, and he proposed formal evening prayers. His wife and daughters led in a spirited version of “All hail the power of Jesus’ name,” after which Gideon and the boys sang a hymn quite popular at the time: “Oh, for a closer walk with God.” When they came to the stirring verse about idols, Reverend Thorn joined in forcefully, for the words could almost serve as the dominant motive of his life:
“The dearest idol I have known,
Whate’er that idol be,
Help me to tear it from Thy throne,
And worship only Thee.”
Prayers by Gideon and his oldest boy followed, then an invitation to the visitor to say a few words. Reverend Thorn spoke long and passionately of the influence a Christian home can have upon a young man, or, as he remembered his sisters and the strong women into which they grew, upon a young female. “It is from homes like this,” he said, “that God picks those who are to carry forward His work on earth.” And in the fullness of his talk he committed himself to sponsoring Abner Hale, for he knew then that while it must be granted that the young man was unpleasant now, in the future he was going to be a great and solid implement of the Lord.
When prayers were ended, and the children dismissed, the reverend asked Gideon for a sheet of paper on which to report to the Board. “Will it be a long letter?” Gideon asked anxiously.
“A short one,” Eliphalet replied. “I have happy news to report.”
Gideon, therefore, prudently tore his letter paper in half and handed his visitor one portion. “We waste nothing here,” he explained, and as the tall missionary began his letter: “Brethren, I have visited the home of Abner Hale and have found that he comes from a family totally dedicated to God …” he happened to look at the narrow shelf where books were kept, and he saw with pleasure that they much resembled the books his family had collected—a battered copy of Euclid, Fox’s Book of Martyrs, a speller of Noah Webster’s, and a well-worn edition of John Bunyan standing beside a family Bible.
“I see with some pleasure,” Reverend Thorn interrupted, “that this Christian family does not surrender to loose poetry and the novels which are becoming so popular in our land.”
“This family is striving toward salvation,” Gideon replied bleakly, and the thin-faced missionary finished the letter which would send Abner Hale to Owhyhee.
As Eliphalet Thorn stepped into the cool spring air, Mr. and Mrs. Hale accompanied him to the bright road
that shimmered in moonlight. “If it were raining,” Gideon said, “or if there were no moon, I’d saddle the horses …” Instead, he pointed the way to Marlboro with his powerful right arm. “It’s not far,” he assured his guest.
Reverend Thorn bade the couple good night and started off toward the dim lights of Marlboro, but after he had gone a short distance he stopped and turned to survey once more the bleak and arid home from which his protégé had come. The trees were in line; the fields were well trimmed; the cattle were fat. For the rest of the farm, one could see only penury, a complete lack of anything relating to beauty, and an austerity of purpose that was positively repellent, except that it so obviously called to the passer-by: “Here is a home that is dedicated to God.” And as if to underline that fact, it was less than two hours after Reverend Thorn’s departure that Abner Hale’s oldest sister rushed weeping into her mother’s room and stood trembling in the moonlight, crying, “Mother! Mother! I was lying awake thinking of the poor Africans about whom Reverend Thorn spoke tonight, and I began to shake, and I heard God’s voice speaking directly to me.”
“Did you have a sense of overwhelming sin?” her mother asked, slipping into a long coat which she used as a night wrap.
“Yes! I saw for the first time that I was hopelessly and utterly damned and that I had no escape.”
“And you felt willing to surrender yourself totally to God?”
“It was as if a great hand were shaking me, violently, bringing me to my senses at last.”
“Gideon!” the girl’s mother cried in ecstasy. “Esther has been initiated into a sense of sin!”
The news was more pleasing than any other that Gideon Hale could have heard, and he cried, “Has she entered into a state of grace?”
“She has!” Mrs. Hale cried. “Oh, blessed Beulah Land, another sinner has found you!” And the three Hales knelt in the moonlight and gave ardent thanks to their bleak and forbidding Protector for having disclosed to still another member of their family the remorseless weight of sin under which mankind lives, the nearness of the inextinguishable fires to which ninety-nine out of every hundred human beings are forever and hopelessly committed, and the joyless, bitter path of salvation.
Within three days Reverend Thorn approached one of the most gracious villages ever to have developed in America: the tree-lined, white-clapboarded, well-gabled village of Walpole, near the Connecticut River in southwestern New Hampshire. It was a village to gladden the heart, for its glistening church steeple could be seen from afar, and the rolling hills that surrounded it were prosperous. It was to Walpole that Reverend Thorn’s older sister Abigail had come when she had stubbornly insisted upon marrying the young Harvard lawyer, Charles Bromley, whose family had lived in Walpole for several generations.
Reverend Thorn had never approved of either the Bromleys or their village, for both bespoke good living rather than piety, and he rarely approached Walpole without a definite feeling that God must one day punish this sybaritic place, a conviction which deepened when he neared the Bromley home, a handsome, large, white three-storied house with many gables. He could hear, with some dismay, his sister playing English dances on the family organ. The dance terminated abruptly and a bright-faced, round-cheeked woman of forty rushed to the door, crying, “It’s Eliphalet!” He, avoiding her kiss and looking about anxiously, was gratified to see that his niece Jerusha was not at home.
“Yes, she is!” Abigail corrected. “She’s upstairs. Brooding. She’s doing very poorly, but if you ask me, it’s because she wants to. She refuses to get him out of her mind, and just when time is about to solve the problem, a letter reaches Boston from Canton or California, and she goes into a decline again.”
“Have you thought of intercepting the letters?” Eliphalet asked.
“Charles would never permit that. He insists that any room which an individual holds within a house is that individual’s castle. And foreign powers, even though they be corrupt, have an inalienable right of communicating with that castle.”
Reverend Thorn was about to say he still could not understand why the Lord did not strike Charles Bromley dead, but since he had been wondering this for the past twenty-two years, and since the Lord stubbornly refused to do anything about it, he left his hackneyed observation unvoiced. What did gall him, however, was the fact that the Lord went out of his way to bless Bromley’s various occupations.
“No,” he said stiffly when his sister asked if he would stay with her. “I shall stop at the inn.”
“Then why did you come so far?” Abigail asked.
“Because I have found an opportunity whereby your daughter may be saved.”
“Jerusha?”
“Yes. Three times I have heard her say that she wanted to surrender her life to Jesus. To work wherever He sent her … as a missionary.”
“Eliphalet!” his sister interrupted. “Those were the words of a young girl disappointed in love. When she spoke thus she hadn’t heard from him for a year.”
“It is in moments of disappointment that we speak our true thoughts,” Thorn insisted.
“But Jerusha has everything she wants right here, Eliphalet.”
“She wants God in her life, Abigail, and here she lacks that.”
“Now, Eliphalet! Don’t you dare …”
“Have you ever discussed with her the things she has told me?” Reverend Thorn pressed. “Have you had the courage?”
“All we know is that if she has recently received a letter from him, she’s in heaven on earth and wants to get married as soon as he docks at New Bedford. But if six or seven months of silence have gone by, she swears she will become a missionary and serve in Africa … like her uncle.”
“Let me speak to her now,” Eliphalet proposed.
“No! She’s in a fit of depression now and she’d agree to anything.”
“Even, perhaps, to the salvation of her immortal soul?”
“Eliphalet! Don’t talk like that. You know that Charles and I try to live good Christian lives …”
“Nobody could live a good Christian life in Walpole, New Hampshire,” he muttered with disgust. “Vanity is all I see here. Look at this room! An organ not used for hymns. Novels. Books of lascivious poems. Money that should be going to missions going into ostentatious decoration. Abigail, a young Massachusetts man, dedicated to God, is about to sail as a missionary to Owhyhee. He has asked me to speak to you regarding Jerusha’s hand.”
Mrs. Bromley fell back in her damasked chair, then collected herself and called a servant. “Go fetch Mr. Bromley immediately,” she ordered.
“I did not come here to talk to your husband,” Eliphalet protested.
“It is my husband, not God, who is Jerusha’s father,” Abigail replied.
“Blasphemy!”
“No, love!”
The brother and sister sat in hateful silence until Charles Bromley, rotund, jovial, successful and overfed, came into the room. “Family fight?” he asked robustly.
“My brother Eliphalet …”
“I know who he is, dear. Just call him Phet.” He laughed and added, “I’ve found in these matters that if you can get the litigants to start off on an informal basis it’s so much better. If you call a man ‘My brother Eliphalet,’ why, out of self-respect you’ve almost got to wind up in court. What’r’ya up to, Phet?”
“A fine young man in the divinity school at Yale College is about to depart as a missionary to Owhyhee …”
“Where’s Owhyhee?”
“Near Asia.”
“Chinese?”
“No. Owhyheean.”
“Never heard of it.”
“And he was much impressed with what I had to say about my niece Jerusha.”
“How did her name come up?” Bromley asked suspiciously.
“It’s humiliating,” Abigail sniffed. “Eliphalet’s going around peddling our daughter. To get her married.”
“I think it’s very generous of him, Abby,” Bromley exploded. “Go
d knows I haven’t had much success peddling her. One week she’s in love with a sailor, whom she hasn’t seen for three years. Abby, did that sailor ever even kiss her?”
“Charles!”
“And the next week she’s in love with God and self-punishment on some distant island. Frankly, Phet, if you could find her a good husband I’d be obliged. I could then spend my efforts on her two sisters.”
“The young man of whom I speak is Abner Hale,” Thorn said stiffly. “Here’s what his professors think of him. I visited his home …”
“Oh, Eliphalet!” his sister protested.
“In the guise of satisfying myself as to his Christian upbringing.”
“And was it a good Christian home?” Bromley inquired.
“It was,” Eliphalet replied. “In every respect.”
Charles Bromley paced the handsomely decorated room for several moments and then said unexpectedly, “If you say it was a good Christian home, Phet, I’m sure it must have been horrible indeed. I can see young Abner Hale right now. Skinny, bad complexion, eyes ruined through too much study, sanctimonious, dirty fingernails, about six years retarded in all social graces. And yet, do you know, as I watch life go past here in Walpole, it’s often those boys who in the long run turn out to be the best husbands.”
In spite of himself, Reverend Thorn always admired the acuity of his brother-in-law’s mind, so now he added what he had never intended saying: “Charles and Abigail, this young man is all the things Charles has just predicted. But he’s also a dedicated man, extremely honest with himself, and one who is going to grow in grace. I wouldn’t want him as a son-in-law now, but in ten years he’ll be the best husband a woman could have.”