She spoke to the “personal workers,” the young women who volunteered to hold cottage prayer-meetings and to go from house to house stirring up spiritual prospects:
“My dear friends, I’m very glad you’re all praying, but there comes a time when you’ve got to add a little shoe-leather. While you’re longing for the Kingdom—the devil does his longing nights, and daytimes he hustles around seeing people, talking to ’em! Are you ashamed to go right in and ask folks to come to Christ—to come to our meetings, anyway? I’m not at all pleased. Not at all, my dear young friends. My charts show that in the Southeast district only one house in three has been visited. This won’t do! You’ve got to get over the idea that the service of the Lord is a nice game, like putting Easter lilies on the altar. Here there’s only five days left, and you haven’t yet waked up and got busy. And let’s not have any silly nonsense about hesitating to hit people for money-pledges, and hitting ’em hard! We can’t pay rent for this lot, and pay for lights and transportation and the wages of all this big crew I carry, on hot air! Now you—you pretty girl there with the red hair—my! I wish I had such hair!—what have you done, sure-enough done, this past week?”
In ten minutes she had them all crying, all aching to dash out and bring in souls and dollars.
She was leaving the tent when Elmer pounced on her, swaggering, his hand out.
“Sister Falconer, I want to congratulate you on your wonderful meetings. I’m a Baptist preacher—the Reverend Gantry.”
“Yes?” sharply. “Where is your church?”
“Why, uh, just at present I haven’t exactly got a church.”
She inspected his ruddiness, his glossiness, the odor of tobacco; her brilliant eyes had played all over him, and she demanded:
“What’s the trouble this time? Booze or women?”
“Why, that’s absolutely untrue! I’m surprised you should speak like that, Sister Falconer! I’m in perfectly good standing! It’s just—I’m taking a little time off to engage in business, in order to understand the working of the lay mind, before going on with my ministry.”
“Um. That’s splendid. Well, you have my blessing, Brother! Now if you will excuse me? I must go and meet the committee.”
She tossed him an unsmiling smile and raced away. He felt soggy, lumbering, unspeakably stupid, but he swore, “Damn you, I’ll catch you when you aren’t all wrapped up in business and your own darn-fool self-importance, and then I’ll make you wake up, my girl!”
II
He had to do nine days’ work, to visit nine towns, in five days, but he was back in Sautersville on Sunday evening and he was on the eleven-o’clock train for Lincoln—in the new brown suit.
His fancy for Sharon Falconer had grown into a trembling passion, the first authentic passion of his life.
It was too late in the evening for a great farewell, but at least a hundred of the brethren and sisters were at the station, singing “God Be with You Till We Meet Again” and shaking hands with Sharon Falconer. Elmer saw his cornet-wielding Yankee friend, Art Nichols, with the rest of the evangelistic crew—the aide, Cecil Aylston, the fat and sentimental tenor soloist, the girl pianist, the violinist, the children’s evangelist, the director of personal work. (That important assistant, the press agent, was in Lincoln making ready for the coming of the Lord.) They looked like a sleepy theatrical troupe as they sat on their suitcases waiting for the train to come in, and like troupers, they were dismayingly different from their stage roles. The anemically pretty pianist, who for public uses dressed in seraphic silver robes, was now merely a small-town girl in wrinkled blue serge; the director of personal work, who had been nun-like in linen, was bold in black-trimmed red, and more attentive to the amorous looks of the German violinist than to the farewell hymns. The Reverend Cecil Aylston gave orders to the hotel baggageman regarding their trunks more like a quartermaster sergeant than like an Oxonian mystic.
Sharon herself was imperial in white, and the magnet for all of them. A fat Presbyterian pastor, with whiskers, buzzed about her, holding her arm with more than pious zeal. She smiled on him (to Elmer’s rage), she smiled equally on the long thin Disciples-of-Christ preacher, she shook hands fervently, and she was tender to each shout of “Praise God, Sister!” But her eyes were weary, and Elmer saw that when she turned from her worshipers, her mouth drooped. Young she seemed then, tired and defenseless.
“Poor kid!” thought Elmer.
The train flared and shrieked its way in, and the troupe bustled with suitcases. “Goodbye—God bless you—God speed the work!” shouted everyone … everyone save the Congregational minister, who stood sulkily at the edge of the crowd explaining to a parishioner, “And so she goes away with enough cash for herself, after six weeks’ work, to have run our whole church for two years!”
Elmer ranged up beside his musical friend, Art Nichols, and as they humped up the steps of a day-coach he muttered, “Art! Art! Got your stomach-medicine here!”
“Great!”
“Say. Look. Fix it so you sit with Sharon. Then pretty soon go out for a smoke—”
“She don’t like smoking.”
“You don’t need to tell her what for! Go out so I can sit down and talk to her for a while. Important business. Here: stick this in your pocket. And I’ll dig up s’more for you at Lincoln. Now hustle and get in with her.”
“Well, I’ll try.”
So, in the dark malodorous car, hot
