IV
Elmer and Frank had gone down on Saturday afternoon to decorate the church for the Thanksgiving service. To save the trip to Babylon and back, they were to spend Saturday night in the broad farmhouse of Deacon Bains, and Lulu Bains and her spinster cousin, Miss Baldwin, were assisting in the decoration—in other words doing it. They were stringing pine boughs across the back of the hall, and arranging a harvest feast of pumpkins, yellow corn, and velvety sumach in front of the pulpit.
“I want your advice, Lulu—Sister Lulu. Don’t you think in my sermon tomorrow it might be helpful to explain—”
(They stood side by side. How sweet were her little shoulders, her soft pussycat cheeks! He had to kiss them! He had to! He swayed toward her. Damn Frank and that Baldwin female! Why didn’t they get out?)
“—to explain that all these riches of the harvest, priceless though they are in themselves and necessary for grub—for the festal board, yet they are but symbols and indications of the—Do sit down, Lulu; you look a little tired.—of the deeper spiritual blessings which he also showers on us and not just at harvest time, and this is a very important point—”
(Her hand dropped against his knee; lay, so white, on the drab pew. Her breasts were young and undrained under her plaid blouse. He had to touch her hand. His fingers crept toward it, touched it by accident, surely by accident, while she looked devotion and he intoned sublimity.)
“—a very important point indeed; all the year round we receive those greater inner blessings, and it is for them more than for any material, uh, material gains that we should lift our voices in Thanksgiving. Don’t you think it might be valuable to all of us if I brought that out?”
“Oh, yes! Indeed I do! I think that’s a lovely thought!”
(His arms tingled. He had to slip them about her.)
Frank and Miss Baldwin had sat down, and they were in an intolerably long discussion as to what ought to be done about that terrible little Cutler boy who said that he didn’t believe that the ravens brought any bread and meat to Elijah, not if he knew anything about these ole crows! Frank explained that he did not wish to rebuke honest doubt; but when this boy went and made a regular business of cutting up and asking foolish questions—
“Lulu!” Elmer urged. “Skip back in the other room with me a second. There’s something about the church work I want to ask you, and I don’t want them to hear.”
There were two rooms in the Schoenheim church: the auditorium and a large closet for the storage of hymnbooks, mops, brooms, folding chairs, communion cups. It was lighted by a dusty window.
“Sister Bains and I are going to look over the Sunday School lesson-charts,” Elmer called largely and brightly.
The fact that she did not deny it bound them together in secrecy. He sat on an upturned bucket; she perched on a stepladder. It was pleasant to be small in her presence and look up to her.
What the “something about church work” which he was going to ask her was, he had no notion, but Elmer was a very ready talker in the presence of young women. He launched out:
“I need your advice. I’ve never met anybody that combined common sense and spiritual values like what you do.”
“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—”