CHAPTER XVIIFATHER AND DAUGHTER
The door of the Reverend John Harting’s study was open. In the softened afternoon light which came from the window above his desk, he sat, giving his morrow’s sermon the last polishing touches. But when Janet would have slipped past, he heard her light footstep, and called to her. She stopped at the door.
“Come in, my dear,” he said, lifting his spectacles to his forehead, and turning from the outspread pages of manuscript. “Would you mind sitting down a moment? I have something I wish to say to you.”
He spoke precisely and formally, and even in ordinary conversation he had a touch of that singsong intonation which all old-time ministers affected. A fringe of white locks, carefully combed, added to the somewhat stern, but almost patriarchal, expression of his angular, deeply lined face. It was the fearless face of a good-hearted man, and yet there was something about it indicative of narrowness and bigotry. Such aface, one fancied, might have belonged to a leader of martyrs.
She came to him, and sat upon the arm of his chair, encircling his neck, and patting his cheek.
“Now, father, dear,” she laughed coaxingly, “I hope you’re not going to scold. I know you didn’t want me to go to the ball game, but I was just dying to go, and Benton invited me, and—”
“He came round here, and cajoled me into consenting, against my will. He is a young man with a most persuasive and flattering tongue.”
“I’ll not dispute you,” she said, thinking of those parting words at the door. “He needed a persuasive tongue to win you over, you are so dreadfully set against baseball. You can’t seem to realize that the game itself is really harmless and clean, and two-thirds of the people of this town are crazy over it. They’ll be crazier still after to-day, for we beat Bancroft—shut ’em out without a single tally, gave ’em nine beautiful goose eggs. What do you think of that, father?”
He looked a bit puzzled. “What have goose eggs to do with baseball, my dear?”
“Oh,” she laughed, “I mean to say that we handed them a beautiful coat of whitewash, and we bingled out a couple of merit marks for ourselves.The crowd just went crazy when our new southpaw slant artist started the fireworks going in the sixth with a clean wallop, moved up a peg on a sacrifice, pilfered the third hassock, and slid home on a beautiful squeeze that gave us our first count, and—”
“Stop, Janet!” he cried, bewildered. “What are you talking about?”
“Why, baseball, daddy! I’m simply telling you how we won the game.”
“You may be trying to tell me, but you are not doing it simply. ‘Coat of whitewash,’ ‘bingle,’ ‘southpaw slant artist,’ ‘clean wallop,’ ‘third hassock,’ ‘beautiful squeeze’! My dear, it’s dreadful for a young lady to use such language. It is ample evidence of the absolutely demoralizing influence of this game called baseball.”
She laughed still more gayly, and again patted his cheek caressingly. “That’s simply the idiom of the game, which every true fan understands.”
“But you should remember that I am not a true fan, whatever that may mean. I abhor slang, especially from the lips of a refined girl. You know my efforts alone last year prevented the desecration of the Sabbath by this dreadful game, which seems to turn people’s heads, and is productive of untold strife and bitterness. Whatwill be thought now when my daughter is seen attending these games?”
“But they are not playing Sunday baseball, daddy, and I agree that you were quite right in bringing your influence to bear against that, though, as I said before, I hold that there is no harm in the game itself.”
“There is harm in whatever produces harm, which is sufficient answer to your argument. And look at the class of men who take part in those games. Would you be proud to associate with them? Would you choose them as friends?”
“No,” she confessed; “not many of them; but still there are some really decent ones who play. Larry Stark is one. I know him, and I’m not ashamed of it.”
“There may be an occasional exception, but you know the old saying that exceptions prove the rule. Once in a while a respectable young man may be led by necessity to make a business of baseball, but I am sure no such young man will long continue to follow it up.”
“Respectable people watch the games. Some of the best people in Kingsbridge were there to-day.”
“Which denotes a deplorable tendency of the times. And you must not forget that this townhas changed from a peaceful country settlement to a place that is rough and crude, and filled with viciousness and vice. I am having a struggle against these evil influences, and I need the moral support of my daughter’s example, at least. If your mother had lived—”
“Now, father, please don’t! You seem to have an idea that I’m a most reckless, wicked young person, and you always use that form of argument to shame me in my sinful ways. I saw in the grand stand to-day several of the most respectable ladies in town, at least two of whom are regular attendants at your church.”
“Some seed must fall on barren ground. I hope young King will not ask you to go with him again. If he comes to me, I shall refuse my consent; if you go, you will do so against my wishes.”
With him in this inflexible mood, she knew the uselessness of persuasion or cajolery, and she left him, to run up to her room a few moments before the maid should call them to tea. Removing her hat before the mirror, she pouted a little at the charming reflection in the glass.
“Father is so set,” she murmured; “yet I’ve always been able to bring him round some way, and I must do it about this; for I just can’t stayaway from the games. I guess I’m a real fan, all right, and I’ll be worse than ever with Kingsbridge winning from Bancroft, and—and Lefty pitching. He’s surely what they can callsome pitcher. And he can fight—gracious!”
She shivered a bit at the recollection of the scene she had witnessed after the game was over. Again she seemed to behold those fighting men hammering at each other with their bare fists, savage, bloodstained, brutal. She shuddered at the remembered glare of their eyes, the wheezing of their panted breathing, and the crushing sound of their blows. From her parted lips came a little gasp, as once more on her ears seemed to fall the clear crack of Tom Locke’s fist smiting his foe full on the point of the jaw with such force that Hoover’s legs had given way beneath him like props of straw.
“He can pitch, and he can fight,” she whispered. “He looks clean and manly, too. I wonder what he’s really like. I suppose he must be coarse and vulgar. When father hears about that affair, he’ll be far more set against the game than ever, and he’s sure to hear, for the whole town must be talking of it now.”
While she made her toilet for tea, the clean-cut, determined face of the young pitcher seemed tohaunt her. Vexed by this, she decided to put him resolutely out of her mind.
“I’m like a silly schoolgirl, seeking a hero to worship,” she laughed, blushing at her folly. “I’m old enough to know better. Such heroes always have feet of clay. Still, I’d like to think of him as well as I can—as a pitcher; and, to do so, it is wise that I should view him from afar, that his flaws may not be too apparent. I’ll take care about that.”
Then her thoughts turned to Benton King, and a little frown gathered upon her face. To-day, as they were driving homeward, and especially as they were saying good night at the door, there had been something in his manner and his words that he had never before unveiled to her. Hitherto they had been just good friends—he deferential, in a way—yet free and easy, as such friends might be, with no self-consciousness or constraint; but now, after this, something warned her that it would be changed, even though, as she believed, he had been neither deep nor sincere in what he had felt or said.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, still frowning; “for I like Bent, and he’s about the only young man in Kingsbridge I’d care to be really friendly with. I suppose it’s been so long since he’s hadan opportunity to talk such nonsense to a girl that he just had to try it on some one to keep in practice. But I don’t like it, and I’ll have to stop it. Next time he tries it, I’ll chaff him till he quits. I’ll tell him I like Lefty.”
She could not have chosen a more certain method of preventing Benton King from quitting.