VIII
He had plans for the Wednesday evening prayer-meeting. He knew what a prayer-meeting in Banjo Crossing would be like. They would drone a couple of hymns and the faithful, half a dozen of them, always using the same words, would pop up and mumble, “Oh, I thank the Lord that he has revealed himself to me and has shown me the error of my ways and oh that those who have not seen his light and whose hearts are heavy with sin may turn to him this evening while they still have life and breath”—which they never did. And the sullenly unhappy woman in the faded jacket, at the back, would demand, “I want the prayers of the congregation to save my husband from the sins of smoking and drinking.”
“I may not,” Elmer meditated, “be as swell a scholar as old Toomis, but I can invent a lot of stunts and everything to wake the church up and attract the crowds, and that’s worth a whole lot more than all this yowling about the prophets and theology!”
He began his “stunts” with that first prayer-meeting.
He suggested, “I know a lot of us want to give testimony, but sometimes it’s hard to think of new ways of saying things, and let me suggest something new. Let’s give our testimony by picking out hymns that express just how we feel about the dear Savior and his help. Then we can all join together in the gladsome testimony.”
It went over.
“That’s a fine fellow, that new Methodist preacher,” said the villagers that week.
They were shy enough, and awkward and apparently indifferent, but in a friendly way they were spying on him, equally ready to praise him as a neighbor or snicker at him as a fool.
“Yes,” they said; “a fine fellow, and smart’s a whip, and mighty eloquent, and a real husky man. Looks you right straight in the eye. Only thing that bothers me—He’s too good to stay here with us. And if he is so good, why’d they ever send him here in the first place? What’s wrong with him? Boozer, d’ye think?”
Elmer, who knew his Paris, Kansas, his Gritzmacher Springs, had guessed that precisely these would be the opinions, and he took care, as he handshook his way from store to store, house to house, to explain that for years he had been out in the evangelistic field, and that by advice of his old and true friend, Bishop Toomis, he was taking this year in a smaller garden-patch to rest up for his labors to come.
He was assiduous, but careful, in his pastoral calls on the women. He praised their gingerbread, Morris chairs, and souvenirs of Niagara, and their children’s school-exercise books. He became friendly, as friendly as he could be to any male, with the village doctor, the village homeopath, the lawyer, the station-agent, and all the staff at Benham’s store.
But he saw that if he was to take the position suitable to him in the realm of religion, he must study, he must gather several more ideas and ever so many new words, to be put together for the enlightenment of the generation.