“Oh, God, I do wish that just once you wouldn’t deliberately misunderstand me! Here I was just carrying on a philosophical discussion, and not speaking personal, and you go and—”
His house in order, he gave attention to clothes. He dressed as calculatingly as an actor. For the pulpit, he continued to wear morning clothes. For his church study, he chose offensively inoffensive lounge suits, gray and brown and striped blue, with linen collars and quiet blue ties. For addresses before slightly boisterous lunch-clubs, he went in for manly tweeds and manly soft collars, along with his manly voice and manly jesting.
He combed his thick hair back from his strong, square face, and permitted it to hang, mane-like, just a bit over his collar. But it was still too black to be altogether prophetic.
The two thousand was gone before they had been in Zenith a month.
“But it’s all a good investment,” he said. “When I meet the Big Bugs, they’ll see I may have a dump of a church in a bum section but I can put up as good a front as if I were preaching on Chickasaw Road.”
V
If in Banjo Crossing Elmer had been bored by inactivity, in Zenith he was almost exhausted by the demands.
Wellspring Church had been carrying on a score of institutional affairs, and Elmer doubled them, for nothing brought in more sympathy, publicity, and contributions. Rich old hyenas who never went to church would ooze out a hundred dollars or even five hundred when you described the shawled mothers coming tearfully to the milk station.
There were classes in manual training, in domestic science, in gymnastics, in bird study, for the poor boys and girls of Old Town. There were troops of Boy Scouts, of Camp Fire Girls. There were Ladies’ Aid meetings, Women’s Missionary Society meetings, regular church suppers before prayer-meeting, a Bible Training School for Sunday School teachers, a sewing society, nursing and free food for the sick and poor, half a dozen clubs of young men and women, half a dozen circles of matrons, and a Men’s Club with monthly dinners, for which the pastor had to snare prominent speakers without payment. The Sunday School was like a small university. And every day there were dozens of callers who asked the pastor for comfort, for advice, for money—young men in temptation, widows wanting jobs, old widows wanting assurance of immortality, hoboes wanting handouts, and eloquent book-agents. Where in Banjo the villagers had been shy to expose their cancerous sorrows, in the city there were always lonely people who reveled in being a little twisted, a little curious, a little shameful; who yearned to talk about themselves and who expected the pastor to be forever interested.
Elmer scarce had time to prepare his sermons, though he really did yearn now to make them original and eloquent. He was no longer satisfied to depend on his barrel. He wanted to increase his vocabulary; he was even willing to have new ideas, lifted out of biology and biography and political editorials.
He was out of the house daily at eight in the morning—usually after a breakfast in which he desired to know of Cleo why the deuce she couldn’t keep Nat and Bunny quiet while he read the paper—and he did not return till six, burning with weariness. He had to study in the evening. … He was always testy. … His children were afraid of him, even when he boisterously decided to enact the Kind Parent for one evening and to ride them pickaback, whether or no they wanted to be ridden pickaback. They feared God properly and kept his commandments, did Nat and Bunny, because their father so admirably prefigured God.
When Cleo was busy with meetings and clubs at the church, Elmer blamed her for neglecting the house; when she slackened her church work, he was able equally to blame her for not helping him professionally. And obviously it was because she had so badly arranged the home routine that he never had time for morning Family Worship. … But he made up for it by the violence of his Grace before Meat, during which he glared at the children if they stirred in their chairs.
And always the telephone was ringing—not only in his office but at home in the evening.
What should Miss Weezeger, the deaconess, do about this old Miss Mally, who wanted a new nightgown? Could the Reverend Gantry give a short talk on “Advertising and the Church” to the Ad Club next Tuesday noon? Could he address the Letitia Music and Literary Club on “Religion and Poetry” next Thursday at four—just when he had a meeting with the Official Board. The church janitor wanted to start the furnace, but the coal hadn’t been delivered. What advice would the Reverend Mr. Gantry give to a young man who wanted to go to college and had no money? From what book was that quotation about “Cato learned Greek at eighty Sophocles” which he had used in last Sunday’s sermon? Would Mr. Gantry be so kind and address the Lincoln School next Friday morning at nine-fifteen—the dear children would be so glad of any Message he had to give them, and the regular speaker couldn’t show up. Would it be all right for the Girls’ Basket Ball team to use the basement tonight? Could the Reverend come out, right now, to the house of Ben T. Evers, 2616 Appleby Street—five miles away—because grandmother was very ill and needed consolation. What the dickens did the Reverend mean by saying, last Sunday, that hellfire might be merely spiritual and figurative—didn’t he know that that was agin Matthew V: 29: “Thy whole body should be cast into hell.” Could he get the proof of the church bulletin back to the printers right away? Could the officers of the Southwest Circle of Women meet in Mr. Gantry’s study tomorrow? Would Reverend Gantry speak at the Old Town Improvement Association Banquet? Did the Reverend
