“Oh, my, you’re just flattering me, Brother Gantry!”
“No, I’m not. Honest, I ain’t! You don’t appreciate yourself. That’s because you’ve always lived in this little burg, but if you were in Chicago or some place like that, believe me, they’d appreciate your, uh, that wonderful sense of spiritual values and everything.”
“Oh—Chicago! My! I’d be scared to death!”
“Well, I’ll have to take you there some day and show you the town! Guess folks would talk about their bad old preacher then!”
They both laughed heartily.
“But seriously, Lulu, what I want to know is—uh—Oh! What I wanted to ask you: Do you think I ought to come down here and hold Wednesday prayer-meetings?”
“Why, I think that’d be awfully nice.”
“But you see, I’d have to come down on that ole handcar.”
“That’s so.”
“And you can’t know how hard I got to study every evening at the Seminary.”
“Oh, yes, I can imagine!”
They both sighed in sympathy, and he laid his hand on hers, and they sighed again, and he removed his hand almost prudishly.
“But of course I wouldn’t want to spare myself in any way. It’s a pastor’s privilege to spend himself for his congregation.”
“Yes, that’s so.”
“But on the other hand, with the roads the way they are here, especially in winter and all, and most of the congregation living way out on farms and all—hard for ’em to get in, eh?”
“That’s so. The roads do get bad. Yes, I think you’re right, Brother Gantry.”
“Oh! Lulu! And here I’ve been calling you by your first name! You’re going to make me feel I been acting terrible if you rebuke me that way and don’t call me Elmer!”
“But then you’re the preacher, and I’m just nobody.”
“Oh, yes, you are!”
“Oh, no, I’m not!”
They laughed very much.
“Listen, Lulu, honey. Remember I’m really still a kid—just twenty-five this month—only ’bout five or six years older’n you are. Now try calling me Elmer, and see how it sounds.”
“Oh, my! I wouldn’t dare!”
“Well, try it!”
“Oh, I couldn’t! Imagine!”
“ ’Fraid cat!”
“I am not so.”
“Yes, you are!”
“No, I’m not!”
“I dare you!”
“Well—Elmer then! So there now!”
They laughed intimately, and in the stress of their merriment he picked up her hand squeezed it, rubbed it against his arm. He did not release it, but it was only with the friendliest and least emphatic pressure that he held it while he crooned:
“You aren’t really scared of poor old Elmer?”
“Yes, I am, a tiny bit!”
“But why?”
“Oh, you’re big and strong and dignified, like you were lots older, and you have such a boom-boom voice—my, I love to listen to it, but it scares me—I feel like you’d turn on me and say, ‘You bad little girl,’ and then I’d have to ’fess. My! And then you’re so terribly educated—you know such long words, and you can explain all these things about the Bible that I never can understand. And of course you are a real ordained Baptist clergyman.”
“Um, uh—But does that keep me from being a man, too?”
“Yes, it does! Sort of!”
Then there was no playfulness, but a grim urgency in his voice:
“Then you couldn’t imagine me kissing you? … Look at me! … Look at me, I tell you! … There! … No, don’t look away now. Why, you’re blushing! You dear, poor, darling kid! You can imagine me kissing—”
“Well, I oughtn’t to!”
“ ’Shamed?”
“Yes, I am!”
“Listen, dear. You think of me as so awfully grown-up, and of course I have to impress all these folks when I’m in the pulpit, but you can see through it and—I’m really just a big bashful kid, and I need your help so. Do you know, dear, you remind me of my mother—”
V
Frank Shallard turned on Elmer in their bedroom, while they were washing for supper—their first moment alone since Lulu and Miss Baldwin had driven them to the Bains farm to spend the night before the Thanksgiving service.
“Look here, Gantry—Elmer. I don’t think it looked well, the way you took Miss Bains in the back room at the church and kept her there—must have been half an hour—and when I came in you two jumped and looked guilty.”
“Uh-huh, so our little friend Franky is a real rubbernecking old woman!”
It was a spacious dusky cavern under the eaves, the room where they were to stay the night. The pitcher on the black walnut washstand was stippled in gold, riotous with nameless buds. Elmer stood glaring, his big forearms bare and dripping, shaking his fingers over the carpet before he reached for the towel.
“I am not a ‘rubberneck,’ and you know it, Gantry. But you’re the preacher here, and it’s our duty, for the effect on others, to avoid even the appearance of evil.”
“Evil to him that evil thinks. Maybe you’ve heard that, too!”
“Oh, yes, Elmer, I think perhaps I have!”
“Suspicious, dirty-minded Puritan, that’s what you are, seeing evil where there ain’t any meant.”
“People don’t hate Puritans because they suspect unjustly, but because they suspect only too darned justly. Look here now, Elmer. I don’t want to be disagreeable—”
“Well, you are!”
“—but Miss Bains—she looks sort of cuddlesome and flirtatious, but I’m dead certain she’s straight as can be, and I’m not going to stand back and watch you try to, uh, to make love to her.”
“Well, smarty, suppose I wanted to marry her?”
“Do you?”
“You know so blame’ much, you ought to know without asking!”
“Do you?”
“I haven’t said I didn’t.”
“Your rhetoric is too complicated for me. I’ll take it that you do mean to. That’s fine! I’ll announce your intentions to Deacon Bains.”
“You will like hell! Now you look here, Shallard! I’m not going to have you poking your long nose into my business, and that’s all there is to it, see?”
“Yes, it would be if you were a layman and I had no official connection with this outfit. I don’t believe too much in going around being moral for other people. But you’re the preacher here—you’re an ordained minister—and I’m responsible with you for the welfare of this church,
