III
On their way home, they two alone, the oldest faculty-member said to the dean, “Yes, it was a fine gratifying moment. And—herumph!—slightly surprising. I’d hardly thought that young Gantry would go on being content with the mild blisses of salvation. Herumph! Curious smell of peppermint he had about him.”
“I suppose he stopped at the drugstore during his walk and had a soft drink of some kind. Don’t know, Brother,” said the dean, “that I approve of these soft drinks. Innocent in themselves, but they might lead to carelessness in beverages. A man who drinks ginger ale—how are you going to impress on him the terrible danger of drinking ale?”
“Yes, yes,” said the oldest faculty-member (he was sixty-eight, to the dean’s boyish sixty). “Say, Brother, how do you feel about young Gantry? About his entering the ministry? I know you did well in the pulpit before you came here, as I more or less did myself, but if you were a boy of twenty-one or -two, do you think you’d become a preacher now, way things are?”
“Why, Brother!” grieved the dean. “Certainly I would! What a question! What would become of all our work at Terwillinger, all our ideals in opposition to the heathenish large universities, if the ministry weren’t the highest ideal—”
“I know. I know. I just wonder sometimes—All the new vocations that are coming up. Medicine. Advertising. World just going it! I tell you, Dean, in another forty years, by 1943, men will be up in the air in flying machines, going maybe a hundred miles an hour!”
“My dear fellow, if the Lord had meant men to fly, he’d have given us wings.”
“But there are prophecies in the Book—”
“Those refer purely to spiritual and symbolic flying. No, no! Never does to oppose the clear purpose of the Bible, and I could dig you out a hundred texts that show unquestionably that the Lord intends us to stay right here on earth till that day when we shall be upraised in the body with him.”
“Herumph! Maybe. Well, here’s my corner. Good night, Brother.”
The dean came into his house. It was a small house.
“How’d it go?” asked his wife.
“Splendid. Young Gantry seemed to feel an unmistakable divine call. Something struck him that just uplifted him. He’s got a lot of power. Only—”
The dean irritably sat down in a cane-seated rocker, jerked off his shoes, grunted, drew on his slippers.
“Only, hang it, I simply can’t get myself to like him! Emma, tell me: If I were his age now, do you think I’d go into the ministry, as things are today?”
“Why, Henry! What in the world ever makes you say a thing like that? Of course you would! Why, if that weren’t the case—What would our whole lives mean, all we’ve given up and everything?”
“Oh, I know. I just get to thinking. Sometimes I wonder if we’ve given up so much. Don’t hurt even a preacher to face himself! After all, those two years when I was in the carpet business, before I went to the seminary, I didn’t do very well. Maybe I wouldn’t have made any more than I do now. But if I could—Suppose I could’ve been a great chemist? Wouldn’t that (mind you, I’m just speculating, as a student of psychology)—wouldn’t that conceivably be better than year after year of students with the same confounded problems over and over again—and always so pleased and surprised and important about them!—or year after year again of standing in the pulpit and knowing your congregation don’t remember what you’ve said seven minutes after you’ve said it?”
“Why, Henry, I don’t know what’s gotten into you! I think you better do a little praying yourself instead of picking on this poor young Gantry! Neither you nor I could ever have been happy except in a Baptist church or a real cover-to-cover Baptist college.”
The dean’s wife finished darning the towels and went up to say good night to her parents.
They had lived with her since her father’s retirement, at seventy-five, from his country pastorate. He had been a missionary in Missouri before the Civil War.
Her lips had been moving, her eyebrows working, as she darned the towels; her eyebrows were still creased as she came into their room and shrieked at her father’s deafness:
“Time to go to bed, Papa. And you, Mama.”
They were nodding on either side of a radiator unheated for months.
“All right, Emmy,” piped the ancient.
“Say Papa—Tell me: I’ve been thinking: If you were just a young man today, would you go into the ministry?”
“Course I would! What an idea! Most glorious vocation young man could have. Idea! G’night, Emmy!”
But as his ancient wife sighingly removed her corsets, she complained, “Don’t know as you would or not—if I was married to you—which ain’t any too certain, a second time—and if I had anything to say about it.”
“Which is certain! Don’t be foolish. Course I would.”
“I don’t know. Fifty years I had of it, and I never did get so I wa’n’t just mad clear through when the ladies of the church came poking around, criticizing me for every little tidy I put on the chairs, and talking something terrible if I had a bonnet or a shawl that was the least mite tasty. ‘ ’Twa’n’t suitable for a minister’s wife.’ Drat ’em! And I always did like a bonnet with some nice bright colors. Oh, I’ve done a right smart of thinking about it. You always were a powerful preacher, but’s I’ve told you—”
“You have!”
“—I never could make out how, if when you were in the pulpit you really knew so much about all these high and mighty and mysterious things, how it was when you got home you never knew enough, and you never could learn enough, to find the hammer or make a nice piece of cornbread or add up a column of figures twice alike or find Oberammergau on the map of Austria!”
“Germany, woman! I’m sleepy!”
“And all these years of having to pretend to be so good when we were just common folks all the time! Ain’t you glad you can just be simple folks now?”
“Maybe it is restful. But that’s not saying I wouldn’t do it over again.” The old man ruminated a long while. “I think I would. Anyway, no use discouraging these young people from entering the ministry. Somebody got to preach the gospel truth, ain’t they?”
“I suppose so. Oh, dear. Fifty years since I married a preacher! And if I could still only be sure about the virgin birth! Now don’t you go explaining! Laws, the number of times you’ve explained! I know it’s true—it’s in the Bible. If I could only believe it! But—
“I would of liked to had you try your hand at politics. If I could of been, just once, to a senator’s house, to a banquet or something, just once, in a nice bright red dress with gold slippers, I’d of been willing to go back to alpaca and scrubbing floors, and listening to you rehearsing your sermons, out in the stable, to that old mare we had for so many years—oh, laws, how long is it she’s been dead now? Must be—yes, it’s twenty-seven years—
“Why is that it’s only in religion that the things you got to believe are agin all experience? Now drat it, don’t you go and quote that ‘I believe because it is impossible’ thing at me again! Believe because it’s impossible! Huh! Just like a minister!
“Oh, dear, I hope I don’t live long enough to lose my faith. Seems like the older I get, the less I’m excited over all these preachers that talk about hell only they never saw it.
“Twenty-seven years! And we had that old hoss so long before that. My how she could kick—Busted that buggy—”
They were both asleep.