Brother Gantry was shaking hands all round. His sanctifying ordination, or it might have been his summer of bouncing from pulpit to pulpit, had so elevated him that he could greet them as impressively and fraternally as a sewing-machine agent. He shook hands with a good grip, he looked at all the more aged sisters as though he were moved to give them a holy kiss, he said the right things about the weather, and by luck or inspiration it was to the most acidly devout man in Boone County that he quoted a homicidal text from Malachi.
As he paraded down the aisle, leading his flock, he panted:
“Got ’em already! I can do something to wake these hicks up, where gasbags like Frank or Carp would just chew the rag. How could I of felt so down in the mouth and so—uh—so carnal last week? Lemme at that pulpit!”
They faced him in hard straight pews, rugged heads seen against the brown wall and the pine double doors grained to mimic oak; they gratifyingly crowded the building, and at the back stood shuffling young men with unshaven chins and pale blue neckties.
He felt power over them while he trolled out the chorus of “The Church in the Wildwood.”
His text was from Proverbs: “Hatred stirreth up strifes: but love covereth all sins.”
He seized the sides of the pulpit with his powerful hands, glared at the congregation, decided to look benevolent after all, and exploded:
“In the hustle and bustle of daily life I wonder how many of us stop to think that in all that is highest and best we are ruled not by even our most up-and-coming efforts but by Love? What is Love—the divine Love of which the—the great singer teaches us in Proverbs? It is the rainbow that comes after the dark cloud. It is the morning star and it is also the evening star, those being, as you all so well know, the brightest stars we know. It shines upon the cradle of the little one and when life has, alas, departed, to come no more, you find it still around the quiet tomb. What is it inspires all great men—be they preachers or patriots or great business men? What is it, my brethren, but Love? Ah, it fills the world with melody, with such sacred melodies as we have just indulged in together, for what is music? What, my friends, is music? Ah, what indeed is music but the voice of Love!”
He explained that hatred was low.
However, for the benefit of the more leathery and zealous deacons down front, he permitted them to hate all Catholics, all persons who failed to believe in hell and immersion, and all rich mortgage-holders, wantoning in the betraying smiles of scarlet women, each of whom wore silk and in her bejeweled hand held a ruby glass of perfidious wine.
He closed by lowering his voice to a maternal whisper and relating a totally imaginary but most improving experience with a sinful old gentleman who on his bed of pain had admitted, to Elmer’s urging, that he ought to repent immediately, but who put it off too long, died amid his virtuous and grief-stricken daughters, and presumably went straight to the devil.
When Elmer had galloped down to the door to shake hands with such as did not remain for Sabbath School, sixteen several auditors said in effect, “Brother, that was a most helpful sermon and elegantly expressed,” and he wrung their hands with a boyish gratitude beautiful to see.
Deacon Bains patted his shoulder. “I’ve never heard so young a preacher hand out such fine doctrine, Brother. Meet my daughter Lulu.”
And she was there, the girl for whom he had been looking ever since he had come to Mizpah.
Lulu Bains was a gray-and-white kitten with a pink ribbon. She had sat at the back of the church, behind the stove, and he had not seen her. He looked down at her thirstily. His excitement at having played his sermon to such applause was nothing beside his excitement over the fact that he would have her near him in his future clerical labors. Life was a promising and glowing thing as he held her hand and tried not to sound too insistently affectionate. “Such a pleasure to meet you, Sister Lulu.”
Lulu was nineteen or twenty. She had a diminutive class of twelve-year-old boys in the Sunday School. Elmer had intended to sneak out during Sunday School, leaving Frank Shallard responsible, and find a place where he could safely smoke a Pittsburgh stogie, but in view of this new spiritual revelation he hung about, beaming with holy approbation of the good work and being manly and fraternal with the little boys in Lulu’s class.
“If you want to grow up and be big fellows, regular sure-enough huskies, you just listen to what Miss Bains has to tell you about how Solomon built that wonderful big ole temple,” he crooned at them; and if they twisted and giggled in shyness, at least Lulu smiled at him … gray-and-white kitten with sweet kitten eyes … small soft kitten, who purred, “Oh, now, Brother Gantry, I’m just so scared I don’t hardly dare teach” … big eyes that took him into their depths, till he heard her lisping as the voice of angels, larks, and whole orchestras of flutes.
He could not let her go at the end of Sunday School. He must hold her—
“Oh, Sister Lulu, come see the handcar Frank and I—Brother Shallard and I—came down on. The fun-niest! Just laugh your head off!”
As the section gang passed through Schoenheim at least ten times a week, handcars could have been no astounding novelty to Lulu, but she trotted beside him, and stared prettily, and caroled, “Oh, hon‑est! Did you come down on that? Well, I never!”
She shook hands
