“Everybody in his office out to dinner. Well, I’ve done all I can till this afternoon,” Elmer reflected virtuously, and joined the Pequot crusaders in the Ishawonga bar. … Eleven men in a booth for eight. Everyone talking at once. Everyone shouting, “Say, waiter, you ask that damn’ bartender if he’s making the booze!”
Within seventeen minutes Elmer was calling all of the eleven by their first names—frequently by the wrong first names—and he contributed to their literary lore by thrice reciting his toast and by telling the best stories he knew. They liked him. In his joy of release from piety and the threat of life with Lulu he flowered into vigor. Six several times the Pequot salesmen said one to another, “Now there’s a fellow we ought to have with us in the firm,” and the others nodded.
He was inspired to give a burlesque sermon.
“I’ve got a great joke on Ad!” he thundered. “Know what he thought I was first? A preacher!”
“Say, that’s a good one!” they cackled.
“Well, at that, he ain’t so far off. When I was a kid, I did think some about being a preacher. Well, say now, listen, and see if I wouldn’t ’ve made a swell preacher!”
While they gaped and giggled and admired, he rose solemnly, looked at them solemnly, and boomed:
“Brethren and Sistern, in the hustle and bustle of daily life you guys certainly do forget the higher and finer things. In what, in all the higher and finer things, in what and by what are we ruled excepting by Love? What is Love?”
“You stick around tonight and I’ll show you!” shrieked Ad Locust.
“Shut up now, Ad! Honest—listen. See if I couldn’t ’ve been a preacher—a knockout—bet I could handle a big crowd well’s any of ’em. Listen. … What is Love? What is the divine Love? It is the rainbow, repainting with its spangled colors those dreary wastes where of late the terrible tempest has wreaked its utmost fury—the rainbow with its tender promise of surcease from the toils and travails and terrors of the awful storm! What is Love—the divine Love, I mean, not the carnal but the divine Love, as exemplified in the church? What is—”
“Say!” protested the most profane of the eleven, “I don’t think you ought to make fun of the church. I never go to church myself, but maybe I’d be a better fella if I did, and I certainly do respect folks that go to church, and I send my kids to Sunday School. You God damn betcha!”
“Hell, I ain’t making fun of the church!” protested Elmer.
“Hell, he ain’t making fun of the church. Just kidding the preachers,” asserted Ad Locust. “Preachers are just ordinary guys like the rest of us.”
“Sure; preachers can cuss and make love just like anybody else. I know! What they get away with, pretending to be different,” said Elmer lugubriously, “would make you gentlemen tired if you knew.”
“Well, I don’t think you had ought to make fun of the church.”
“Hell, he ain’t making fun of the church.”
“Sure, I ain’t making fun of the church. But lemme finish my sermon.”
“Sure, let him finish his sermon.”
“Where was I? … What is Love? It is the evening and the morning star—those vast luminaries that as they ride the purple abysms of the vasty firmament vouchsafe in their golden splendor, the promise of higher and better things that—that—Well, say, you wise guys, would I make a great preacher or wouldn’t I?”
The applause was such that the bartender came and looked at them funereally; and Elmer had to drink with each of them.
But he was out of practise. And he had had no lunch.
He turned veal-white; sweat stood on his forehead and in a double line of drops along his upper lip, while his eyes were suddenly vacant.
Ad Locust squealed, “Say, look out! Elm’s passing out!”
They got him up to Ad’s room, one man supporting him on either side and one pushing behind, just before he dropped insensible, and all that afternoon, when he should have met the Flowerdale Baptist committee, he snored on Ad’s bed, dressed save for his shoes and coat. He came to at six, with Ad bending over him, solicitous.
“God I feel awful!” Elmer groaned.
“Here. What you need’s a drink.”
“Oh, Lord, I mustn’t take any more,” said Elmer, taking it. His hand trembled so that Ad had to hold the glass to his mouth. He was conscious that he must call up Deacon Eversley at once. Two drinks later he felt better, and his hand was steady. The Pequot bunch began to come in, with a view to dinner. He postponed his telephone call to Eversley till after dinner; he kept postponing it; and he found himself, at ten on Easter morning, with a perfectly strange young woman in a perfectly strange flat, and heard Ad Locust, in the next room, singing “How Dry I Am.”
Elmer did a good deal of repenting and groaning before his first drink of the morning, after which he comforted himself, “Golly, I never will get to that church now. Well, I’ll tell the committee I was taken sick. Hey, Ad! How’d we ever get here? Can we get any breakfast in this dump?”
He had two bottles of beer, spoke graciously to the young lady in the kimono and red slippers, and felt himself altogether a fine fellow. With Ad and such of the eleven as were still alive, and a scattering of shrieking young ladies, he drove out to a dance-hall on the lake, Easter Sunday afternoon, and they returned to Monarch for lobster and jocundity.
“But this ends it. Tomorrow morning I’ll get busy and see Eversley and fix things up,” Elmer vowed.
IV
In that era long-distance telephoning was an uncommon event, but Eversley, deacon and lawyer, was a bustler. When the new preacher had not appeared by six on Saturday afternoon, Eversley telephoned to Babylon, waited while Dean Trosper was fetched
