Blue Ruin

  “Oh, I gave up that idea long ago,” he laughed. “I think this country needs preachers more than the foreign field. Times are changed, you know. A lot has been done for heathen lands in the last ten years. The world isn’t nearly as large as it used to be. Travel has become so easy, and civilization has made great strides. Culture and education are everywhere. Why, look what a difference movies and radios have made! The natives in the jungles of the forest can get the latest Paris fashion overnight now. There really isn’t the need of missionaries there used to be when I began to study for the ministry.”

  Lynette giggled appreciatively.

  “You talk as if the main object of missionaries was to dress up the natives in fashionable garments.”

  “Well, that had a great deal to do with civilizing them, didn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lynette with serious eyes far off on the mountain where the blue incense seemed to rise and fall with the light breeze. “Did it? I don’t know. What’s that verse about ‘where no law is, there is no transgression’?”

  “Oh, now, Lynn, don’t, I pray you, get preachy. I’m sick to death of arguments and criticisms and obscure passages. Besides, my dear, you are not fitted to cope with a subject like that. The standpoint from which we used to take our conclusions when we were children is very different when you come to get the student’s point of view. Let’s drop discussions from now on. We’ve got a long way to go to catch up in our knowledge of each other. Let’s talk about each other. Lynn, are you glad to be at home, or does the old town look dull to you?”

  “Look dull? Well, I should rather guess not. Why, Dana, I turned down a whole perfectly good, free trip to Europe with side trips and a possible winter stay over there with a trip to the Holy Land and a return by way of the Mediterranean thrown in. Now, will you believe that I’m glad to be here?”

  “Lynn Brooke! D’ you mean it? Turn down a trip like that? What for?”

  “Just because there was no place in the whole world that looked so good to me as my hometown—and you in it all summer long!” Lynette added the last words half shyly, half jocosely, and glanced up through her lashes at her companion with a heightened color in her lovely cheeks. But Dana frowned.

  “Lynn, I can’t believe you were quite so foolish as that. Tell me about it. Who invited you?”

  “Uncle Roth Reamer. He and Aunt Hilda and my three cousins are going, and they wanted me.”

  “Expenses paid?”

  “Every cent. And spending money thrown in! Uncle Roth is always generous and treats me just like the rest of his children when I’m visiting there.”

  “Well, you certainly are one little fool!” said Dana almost roughly. “Why, Lynn, think of the advantages of culture and study abroad! Think of the prestige of having traveled like that! Why, it would do a whole lot toward making up for having been graduated at a little insignificant college if it were known that you had traveled widely. You need sophistication, Lynn. You haven’t grown up! You’re just as innocent as when you were a child! You really need to grow up. You don’t realize that you will have a very prominent position to occupy and need to get ready for it.”

  Lynette looked up at him startled, a cloud coming over the brightness of her face, her lips compressed with a sudden indrawing of her breath, the color on her face springing up brighter.

  She was silent for a moment, still keeping that wondering, searching gaze on his face, and when she spoke her voice was very quiet and almost cool.

  “Do you mean, Dana, that you are ashamed of me as I am?”

  “Nonsense!” said Dana impatiently. “There you go, off the handle at once, jumping to conclusions. That’s just what I mean. Like an everlasting thermometer, out to check the temperature and be sure it’s just at seventy. You need poise, Lynn! And travel will give it to you. If your school had been any good you wouldn’t be so utterly childish. If I’m to be called to a big-city church, you will need to get poise. There’s nothing like that to help you up in the world and make you able to hold your own.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand, Dana,” said Lynette in a small, distant voice, almost like a stranger. “I supposed you were looking forward to preaching the gospel. What has that got to do with social prestige?”

  “A very great deal!” said Dana with the air of a teacher who was condescending to explain to the humblest of pupils. “In the first place, a preacher’s wife can do a lot toward helping or hindering her husband’s progress in his work. She is either an asset or a liability. I have always figured that you, Lynette, with your beauty and your goodness—your most obvious goodness—and your charm of manner would be the greatest kind of an asset. But there is something else. It is something that women of the world have, and that is why they succeed so well.” He floundered a little here, for her eyes were upon him, wondering eyes, as if she had never quite known this Dana before.

  “There is a verse in the Bible,” he suddenly said with irritation, “which you should remember. We are bidden to be wise as serpents! That’s what it means, use worldly wisdom. Acquire the poise that the world has and then we shall be better able to cope with—”

  He paused, searching for a word.

  “Sin?” supplied Lynette questioningly. “I hadn’t really ever thought of it in that way.”

  There was something in her voice that irritated him still further, for he felt that somehow, while he was attempting to show her how she was wrong, she had instead revealed a weakness in himself. Or—could she possibly be laughing at him? He had not made his case as strong as it seemed to him to be. He must try again. You never could force Lynette into a situation, you must always lead her. He ought to have remembered that. She would do anything in the world for him, but of course she did not like his criticism of that little superficial college of hers. That was what was the matter.

  “Lynn,” he said, softening his voice to its old lover-like strain, “I see I haven’t made my meaning plain. It’s all because I don’t like to blow my own trumpet and tell you all the great prospects that have come to me. You see, they’ve been saying a lot of fine things about my work, and my ability, up there at the seminary, and I’ve the same as got the choice of two or three prominent pulpits if I just say the word. Let’s quit this foolish quarreling and let me tell the whole thing. Don’t you want to hear what my senior professor said to me the last day, the man who has the reputation of forecasting the future of his students and never making a mistake?”

  “Why, surely,” said Lynn graciously, her eyes misty with pride in him, despite her disturbed spirit. “You know I enjoy hearing everything about your seminary life. But it never surprises me, Dana. I knew you would excel. Now, tell me every word.”

  There was just the least bit of hurt tone in her voice that he had not felt the same about her, but he did not notice it in his eagerness to tell her, and she was too humble in spirit to assert it again.

  So Dana told.

  Long incidents of class lore. Struggles for scholarly supremacy, days and nights of grinding. Self-denial of a kind, Dana’s kind, the kind that really got what he wanted. Grudging recognition at first on the part of his friends, instant recognition on the part of the professors. Brilliant accounts of arguments and discussions in class in which he came forward with some original thought, was challenged, and was able to bring notable critics as testimony to substantiate his theory. In short, as she listened, Lynette perceived that this was no longer her mate and equal, her boy companion of the years, to whom she was giving audience, but a distinguished scholar who had already made his mark before his career had fairly opened.

  Lynette’s heart was full of joy.

  She forgot for the time-being his criticism of herself.

  They had passed by the embroidered pastures and valleys, leaving the blue-flowered smoke behind on the mountain, and as they went up higher into a thick grove of trees bordered by fringes of maidenhair fern unbelievably luxuriant, fragilely lovely, Lynette was conscious of a tightening o
f the muscles round her heart. To think that he was hers, and they were here in sanctuary as it were, alone with the great out of doors to talk together again and get to know the things about one another that had been withheld through the months of separation!

  Her eyes rested pridefully upon him as he tossed off his hat and threw himself down upon the moss at her side, and she was conscious again of the quickening heartbeats, the sudden shyness that made her fight for time—just a little space to get used to his nearness again, to the thought that they were really grown up.

  “Tell me something, Dana, I’ve often wondered,” she said, suddenly feeling the necessity to cover her shyness with words.

  “Yes, dearest!” He smiled down upon her and reached out to take possession of her hand which lay beside him on the moss. It was his first open acknowledgment of the relation between them, which had been tacitly set aside for years of their education, the first time he had ventured on that “dearest” since his very young boy affection which she had gravely restrained with wiser foresight than his own. “We are not old enough for such things yet, Dana, please don’t spoil the beautiful time we are having now,” she had told him. How well she remembered saying it to him, and having to argue it out for days when he would not be convinced. Yet in the end she had conquered, and their friendship had gone on, with only the tacit understanding that there was to be no more sentimentality until they were done with schooldays. Nevertheless they had both looked forward to living their lives side by side to the end and had often referred to the time when that would be as if it were a foregone conclusion.

  Dana had wanted to give her a ring two years before, the day he was going back to seminary and she to her college. But she had said no, he must not spend the money now, and it would be time enough to settle those things when they both got home for good.

  Lynette had known when she came home this time that she was coming home to face what she had put behind a lovely veil out of sight for a long time, but had always deep in her heart known was waiting there for her when the right time came. Today, she had started out with the knowledge that the time had come. The lessons were learned for both of them, and they had a right to let their hearts speak out to one another and to take their right relations before the world. Yet now that it had come she felt a sudden strange shyness, as if Dana were not the same, as if he had changed into a new man, one that she admired greatly and respected and loved beyond all the world; yet somehow she stood in a strange new awe before him. And so she spoke breathlessly, marking time for her heart to get steady and used to the thrill of his touch in this new way.

  “I’ve always wanted to know just why you decided to study for the ministry, why you were so sure even when you were a little boy and I first knew you that there was nothing else in life for you. Was it that your grandfather had been such a great preacher and that you had his name and felt you must keep a sort of tryst with the work he had commenced, or was it—something else?” She finished shyly with her eyes gravely down, her face almost quivering in her eagerness. “I think I know the answer, Dana”—she lifted her eyes for a single fleeting look—“but I want to hear you say it, if you don’t mind.”

  It was very still there in the edge of the pine forest, with the fringe of maidenhair below them and the shimmer of the embroidery of copper and silver and gold out in the June Valleys far away. Almost for an instant it seemed to Lynette that it was sanctuary indeed, with the whispering winds above in the pines, a bird note dropping slowly down now and then from the throat of a thrush, and Dana’s eyes upon her in that grave, sweet, utterly loving look. Then he spoke.

  “Lovely, of course I’ll tell you, though there’s not so much to tell. As you say, you know it already, you’ve known it all along. Why of course it was Grandfather. I felt the obligation, sort of. I was named for him; he left me his property, or at least he left it with Grandmother in trust for me, you know. That’s the same thing. It was Grandfather’s dearest wish. And the family all expect it. A man would be a cad not to carry on after that. I thought about it a good deal when I was in college. There were several other lines I might have taken up where I would have been able to make more money and fame right at the start than seemed likely at that time I could ever make in the ministry. But nowhere would I have had more prestige of course. Really Grandfather was quite a great man. I never really understood how great until I entered the seminary. There were men there who remembered him, enthused over his preaching and all that. More than once he was held up in class as an example of a man who had reached the top of his profession. His sermons, too, were cited as illustrations of a pure, direct style that was recommended for imitation. You would have been surprised how reverently even some of the more eminent scholars among the faculty spoke of his strange, old-fashioned books of sermons. I read them long ago, of course, when I was a mere boy. They filled me with awe then with their tremendous earnestness. Of course they are quite out of date now, but classics in their way. I almost got my head turned, Lynn, they made so much of it in seminary, I having the same name and all and following in his footsteps. It did a lot for me in the way of prestige. Lynn, the light on your hair just there where you’re sitting is lovely. I don’t know but I’m glad you never bobbed your hair, though I confess I’m surprised that you’ve lived through the fashion so long without doing it. You will have to come to it of course if the fashion doesn’t change soon, though, for if I get a city church you’ll have to be quite up to date, you know.”

  She looked at him startled then smiled. He was joking of course. She laughed. “A city church!” she echoed. “You couldn’t begin on a city church, of course!”

  “Brownleigh thinks I can,” he said gravely, with conviction. “He says my talents would be wasted anywhere else. So you better be thinking about cutting your hair. You don’t want to look like a country parson’s wife.”

  Lynette did not smile. Her eyes were puzzled as she studied his face.

  “You speak almost as if you meant that,” she said lightly.

  “I do,” he said brightly. “I think you would be charming with it cut. Haven’t you often longed to get it off and be like the other girls?”

  “But you used to say you liked my hair,” said Lynette.

  “Well, I do, but one must be reasonable. You can’t go against the whole world of course, and one gets used to those things. But Lynn, I’m hungry as a bear. Why don’t we eat? I haven’t told you yet, but I’ve got to go back pretty soon.”

  “Got to go back!” said Lynette in dismay. “Why, you said we were to stay till sunset! It’s our day. It’s been four years since we sat up here till sunset and talked so long, you know. It’s—”

  She had almost said, “It’s my birthday, you know,” but he saved her further words.

  “You don’t say! It was about this time, wasn’t it? Well, it’s too bad. But we’ll come another time, tomorrow if I can manage it. You see we’re going to have company at our house for several weeks I’m afraid, but it won’t affect me after today. I gave Aunt Justine warning I wouldn’t have anybody wished on me this summer. But I have to go down to meet them on the four-thirty train; the woman is sick and she has her child with her, and they can’t walk to the bus line. I offered to pay for a taxi but Aunt Justine seemed to think that was ungracious when they are first arriving, and she carried on so that I had to give in and say I’d come home in time to cart them up from the train. Aunt Justine is a great nuisance. She knows how to put the whole household in an uproar with just a few words. If I had my way she would be sent away. But Grandmother seems to think she has an obligation so there’s no way. Now, let’s see what’s in that basket. I declare I’ve been starving all the way up. I’m sure I smell chocolate cake and tarts. Are there tarts? I knew it! Open it quick, Lynn. We mustn’t waste anymore time!”

  Lynette gravely lifted the white cloth and spread it on the moss. There lay the neat little waxed-paper packages as she had placed them, but the glory had gone out of them somehow. She heard
Dana saying funny things and praising and exclaiming, but it did not seem to mean anything to her. She couldn’t quite understand why. Was she such a silly, selfish girl that she had to hang on to a piece of a day when somebody else needed it? Of course Dana must go after his aunt’s company, and of course she must not let him see that she was disappointed. What was an hour to two more or less out of a day when it was all to be theirs by and by? What would it matter if they did go down a little earlier than they had planned? Dana hated it, of course, as much as she did. And he was coming to dinner. It wouldn’t be but a few minutes they would be separated.

  She looked up with a smile.

  “Well, never mind,” she said with a sigh that she tried to turn into cheerfulness. “It won’t take you but a few minutes, and you’ll come right back to the house after you have got them, won’t you? You know you are to take dinner at our house tonight. You remember I invited you four years ago, don’t you?”

  “Am I? Why, sure, you did, didn’t you, Lynn? How you keep little details in your mind, don’t you? That’s going to be a great asset in a minister’s wife. Lynn, I can see you’re going to be a great help to me.”

  “It’s what I want to be,” she breathed almost inaudibly, as if she were registering a long-contemplated vow. “I haven’t forgotten that my own father was a minister, you know, too.”

  “Why, so he was!” said Dana taking a great bite out of his chicken sandwich. “We’ll be quite following in the way of tradition, won’t we? Only I don’t intend that you shall be ridden to death by any congregation. It isn’t the fashion now for the minister’s wife to have to be the slave to the church. They don’t even make calls on anybody except the ones they want for close friends. We’ll see something of society, sweetheart, and go to some good concerts and maybe get a trip abroad now and then. You don’t realize what great things we’re coming into. You won’t know yourself five years from now. I’m not going to have you all worn out carrying soup to the sick and comforting the brokenhearted and running mite societies. You’re mine, you know. I shall need all the comforting you’ll have time to give, and we’ll have a maid to make the soup and a deaconess to visit the parishioners.”