IX
Frank had been with the Charity Organization Society for three years, and he had become assistant general secretary at the time of the Dayton evolution trial. It was at this time that the brisker conservative clergymen saw that their influence and oratory and incomes were threatened by any authentic learning. A few of them were so intelligent as to know that not only was biology dangerous to their positions, but also history—which gave no very sanctified reputation to the Christian church; astronomy—which found no convenient Heaven in the skies and snickered politely at the notion of making the sun stand still in order to win a Jewish border skirmish; psychology—which doubted the superiority of a Baptist preacher fresh from the farm to trained laboratory researchers; and all the other sciences of the modern university. They saw that a proper school should teach nothing but bookkeeping, agriculture, geometry, dead languages made deader by leaving out all the amusing literature, and the Hebrew Bible as interpreted by men superbly trained to ignore contradictions, men technically called “Fundamentalists.”
This perception the clergy and their most admired laymen expressed in quick action. They formed half a dozen competent and well-financed organizations to threaten rustic state legislators with political failure and bribe them with unctuous clerical praise, so that these back-street and backwoods Solons would forbid the teaching in all state-supported schools and colleges of anything which was not approved by the evangelists.
It worked edifyingly.
To oppose them there were organized a few groups of scholars. One of these organizations asked Frank to speak for them. He was delighted to feel an audience before him again, and he got leave from the Zenith Charity Organization Society for a lecture tour.
He came excitedly and proudly to his first assignment, in a roaring modern city in the Southwest. He loved the town; believed really that he came to it with a “message.” He tasted the Western air greedily, admired the buildings flashing up where but yesterday had been prairie. He smiled from the hotel bus when he saw a poster which announced that the Reverend Frank Shallard would speak on “Are the Fundamentalists Witch Hunters?” at Central Labor Hall, auspices of the League for Free Science.
“Bully! Fighting again! I’ve found that religion I’ve been looking for!”
He peered out for other posters. … They were all defaced.
At his hotel was a note, typed, anonymous: “We don’t want you and your hellish atheism here. We can think for ourselves without any imported ‘liberals.’ If you enjoy life, you’d better be out of this decent Christian city before evening. God help you if you aren’t! We have enough mercy to give warning, but enough of God’s justice to see you get yours right if you don’t listen. Blasphemers get what they ask for. We wonder if you would like the feeling of a blacksnake across your lying face? The Committee.”
Frank had never known physical conflict more violent than boyhood wrestling. His hand shook. He tried to sound defiant with: “They can’t scare me!”
His telephone, and a voice: “This Shallard? Well this is a brother preacher speaking. Name don’t matter. I just want to tip you off that you’d better not speak tonight. Some of the boys are pretty rough.”
Then Frank began to know the joy of anger.
The hall of his lecture was half filled when he looked across the ice-water pitcher on the speaker’s table. At the front were the provincial intellectuals, most of them very eager, most of them dreadfully poor: a Jewish girl librarian with hungry eyes, a crippled tailor, a spectacled doctor sympathetic to radical disturbances but too good a surgeon to be driven out of town. There was a waste of empty seats, then, and at the back a group of solid, prosperous, scowling burghers, with a leonine man who was either an actor, a congressman, or a popular clergyman.
This respectable group grumbled softly, and hissed a little as Frank nervously began.
America, he said, in its laughter at the “monkey trial” at Dayton, did not understand the veritable menace of the Fundamentalists’ crusade. (“Outrageous!” from the leonine gentleman.) They were mild enough now; they spoke in the name of virtue; but give them rope, and there would be a new Inquisition, a new hunting of witches. We might live to see men burned to death for refusing to attend Protestant churches.
Frank quoted the Fundamentalist who asserted that evolutionists were literally murderers, because they killed orthodox faith, and ought therefore to be lynched; William Jennings Bryan, with his proposal that any American who took a drink outside the country should be exiled for life.
“That’s how these men speak, with so little power—as yet!” Frank pleaded. “Use your imaginations! Think how they would rule this nation, and compel the more easygoing half-liberal clergy to work with them, if they had the power!”
There were constant grunts of “That’s a lie!” and “They ought to shut him up!” from the back, and now Frank saw marching into the hall a dozen tough young men. They stood ready for action, looking expectantly toward the line of prosperous Christian Citizens.
“And you have here in your own city,” Frank continued, “a minister of the gospel who enjoys bellowing that anyone who disagrees with him is a Judas.”
“That’s enough!” cried someone at the back, and the young toughs galloped down the aisle toward Frank, their eyes hot with cruelty, teeth like a fighting dog’s, hands working—he could feel them at his neck. They were met and held a moment by the sympathizers in front. Frank saw the crippled tailor knocked down by a man who stepped on the body as he charged on.
With a curious lassitude more than with any fear, Frank sighed, “Hang it, I’ve got to join the fight and get killed!”
He started down from the platform.
The chairman seized his shoulder. “No! Don’t! You’ll get beaten to death! We need you! Come here—come here! This back door!”
Frank was thrust through a door into a half-lighted alley.
A motor was waiting, and by it two men, one of whom cried, “Right in here, Brother.”
It was a large sedan; it seemed security, life. But as Frank started to climb in he noted the man at the wheel, then looked closer at the others. The man at the wheel had no lips but only a bitter dry line across his face—the mouth of an executioner. Of the other two, one was like an unreformed bartender, with curly mustache and a barber’s lock; one was gaunt, with insane eyes.
“Who are you fellows?” he demanded.
“Shut your damned trap and get t’ hell in there!” shrieked the bartender, pushing Frank into the back of the car, so that he fell with his head on the cushion.
The insane man scrambled in, and the car was off.
“We told you to get out of town. We gave you your chance. By God, you’ll learn something now, you God damned atheist—and probably a damn socialist or I.W.W. too!” the seeming bartender said. “See this gun?” He stuck it into Frank’s side, most painfully. “We may decide to let you live if you keep your mouth shut and do what we tell you to—and again we may not. You’re going to have a nice ride with us! Just think what fun you’re going to have when we get you in the country—alone—where it’s nice and dark and quiet!”
He placidly lifted his hands and gouged Frank’s cheek with his strong fingernails.
“I won’t stand it!” screamed Frank.
He rose, struggling. He felt the gaunt fanatic’s fingers—just two fingers, demon-strong—close on his neck, dig in with pain that made him sick. He felt the bartender’s fist smashing his jaw. As he slumped down, limp against the forward seat, half-fainting, he heard the bartender chuckle:
“That’ll give the blank, blank, blank of a blank some idea of the fun we’ll have watching him squirm bimeby!”
The gaunt one snapped, “The boss said not to cuss.”
“Cuss, hell! I don’t pretend to be any tin angel. I’ve done a lot of tough things. But, by God, when a fellow pretending to be a minister comes sneaking around trying to make fun of the Christian religion—the only chance us poor devils have got to become decent again—then, by God, it’s time to show we’ve got some guts and appreciation!”
The pseudo-bartender spoke with the smugly joyous tones of any crusader given a chance to be fiendish for a moral reason, and placidly raising his leg, he brought his heel down on Frank’s instep.
When the cloud of pain had cleared from his head, Frank sat rigid. … What would Bess and the kids do if these men killed him? … Would they beat him much before he died?
The car left the highway, followed a country road and ran along a lane, through what seemed to Frank to be a cornfield. It stopped by a large tree.
“Get out!” snapped the gaunt man.
Mechanically, his legs limp, Frank staggered out. He looked up at the moon. “It’s the last time I’ll ever see the moon—see the stars—hear voices. Never again to walk on a fresh morning!”
“What are you going to do?” he said, hating them too much to be afraid.
“Well, dearie,” said the driver, with a dreadful jocosity, “you’re going to take a little walk with us, back here in the fields a ways.”
“Hell!” said the bartender, “let’s hang him. Here’s a swell tree. Use the towrope.”
“No,” from the gaunt man. “Just hurt him enough so he’ll remember, and then he can go back and tell his atheist friends it ain’t healthy for ’em in real Christian parts. Move, you!”
Frank walked in front of them, ghastly silent. They followed a path through the cornfield to a hollow. The crickets were noisily cheerful; the moon serene.
“This’ll do,” snarled the gaunt one; then to Frank: “Now get ready to feel good.”
He set his pocket electric torch on a clod of earth. In its light Frank saw him draw from his pocket a coiled black leather whip, a whip for mules.
“Next time,” said the gaunt one, slowly, “next time you come back here, we’ll kill you. And any other yellow traitor and stinker and atheist like you. Tell ’em all that! This time we won’t kill you—not quite.”
“Oh, quit talking and let’s get busy!” said the bartender. “All right!”
The bartender caught Frank’s two arms behind, bending them back, almost breaking them, and suddenly with a pain appalling and unbelievable the whip slashed across Frank’s cheek, cutting it, and instantly it came again—again—in a darkness of reeling pain.