That must have been the time—it certainly was during that vacation between their Sophomore and Junior years—when Eddie walked out to the farm where Elmer was working, and looked at Elmer, bulky and hayseedy in a sleeveless undershirt, and spoke reasonably of the weather, and walked back again. …
Whenever Elmer was at home, though he tried affectionately to live out his mother’s plan of life for him, though without very much grumbling he went to bed at nine-thirty, whitewashed the henhouse, and accompanied her to church, yet Mrs. Gantry suspected that sometimes he drank beer and doubted about Jonah, and uneasily Elmer heard her sobbing as she knelt by her high-swelling, white-counterpaned, old-fashioned bed.
III
With alarmed evangelistic zeal, Jim Lefferts struggled to keep Elmer true to the faith, after his exposure to religion in defending Eddie at Cato.
He was, on the whole, rather more zealous and fatiguing than Eddie.
Nights, when Elmer longed to go to sleep, Jim argued; mornings, when Elmer should have been preparing his history, Jim read aloud from Ingersoll and Thomas Paine.
“How you going to explain a thing like this—how you going to explain it?” begged Jim. “It says here in Deuteronomy that God chased these Yids around in the desert for forty years and their shoes didn’t even wear out. That’s what it says, right in the Bible. You believe a thing like that? And do you believe that Samson lost all his strength just because his gal cut off his hair? Do you, eh? Think hair had anything to do with his strength?”
Jim raced up and down the stuffy room, kicking at chairs, his normally bland eyes feverish, his forefinger shaken in wrath, while Elmer sat humped on the edge of the bed, his forehead in his hands, rather enjoying having his soul fought for.
To prove that he was still a sound and freethinking stalwart, Elmer went out with Jim one evening and at considerable effort, they carried off a small outhouse and placed it on the steps of the Administration Building.
Elmer almost forgot to worry after the affair of Eddie and Dr. Lefferts.
Jim’s father was a medical practitioner in an adjoining village. He was a plump, bearded, bookish, merry man, very proud of his atheism. It was he who had trained Jim in the faith and in his choice of liquor; he had sent Jim to this denominational college partly because it was cheap and partly because it tickled his humor to watch his son stir up the fretful complacency of the saints. He dropped in and found Elmer and Jim agitatedly awaiting the arrival of Eddie.
“Eddie said,” wailed Elmer, “he said he was coming up to see me, and he’ll haul out some more of these proofs that I’m going straight to hell. Gosh, Doctor, I don’t know what’s got into me. You better examine me. I must have anemics or something. Why, one time, if Eddie Fislinger had smiled at me, damn him, think of him daring to smile at me!—if he’d said he was coming to my room, I’d of told him, ‘Like hell you will!’ and I’d of kicked him in the shins.”
Dr. Lefferts purred in his beard. His eyes were bright.
“I’ll give your friend Fislinger a run for his money. And for the inconsequential sake of the nonexistent Heaven, Jim, try not to look surprised when you find your respectable father being pious.”
When Eddie arrived, he was introduced to a silkily cordial Dr. Lefferts, who shook his hand with that lengthiness and painfulness common to politicians, salesmen, and the godly. The doctor rejoiced:
“Brother Fislinger, my boy here and Elmer tell me that you’ve been trying to help them see the true Bible religion.”
“I’ve been seeking to.”
“It warms my soul to hear you say that, Brother Fislinger! You can’t know what a grief it is to an old man tottering to the grave, to one whose only solace now is prayer and Bible-reading”—Dr. Lefferts had sat up till four a.m., three nights ago, playing poker and discussing biology with his cronies, the probate judge and the English stock-breeder—“what a grief it is to him that his only son, James Blaine Lefferts, is not a believer. But perhaps you can do more than I can, Brother Fislinger. They think I’m a fanatical old fogy. Now let me see—You’re a real Bible believer?”
“Oh, yes!” Eddie looked triumphantly at Jim, who was leaning against the table, his hands in his pockets, as expressionless as wood. Elmer was curiously hunched up in the Morris chair, his hands over his mouth. The doctor said approvingly:
“That’s splendid. You believe every word of it, I hope, from cover to cover?”
“Oh, yes. What I always say is, ‘It’s better to have the whole Bible than a Bible full of holes.’ ”
“Why, that’s a real thought, Brother Fislinger. I must remember that, to tell any of these alleged higher critics, if I ever meet any! ‘Bible whole—not Bible full of holes.’ Oh, that’s a fine thought, and cleverly expressed. You made it up?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“I see, I see. Well, that’s splendid. Now of course you believe in the premillennial coming—I mean the real, authentic, genuwine, immediate, bodily, premillennial coming of Jesus Christ?”
“Oh, yes, sure.”
“And the virgin birth?”
“Oh, you bet.”
“That’s splendid! Of course there are doctors who question whether the virgin birth is quite in accordance with their experience of obstetrics, but I tell those fellows, ‘Look here! How do I know it’s true? Because it says so in the Bible, and if it weren’t true, do you suppose it would say so in the Bible?’ That certainly shuts them up! They have precious little to say after that!”
By this time a really beautiful, bounteous fellowship was flowing between Eddie and the doctor, and they were looking with pity on the embarrassed faces of the two heretics left out in the cold. Dr. Lefferts tickled his beard and crooned:
“And of course, Brother Fislinger,
