II
Spring on the prairie, high spring. Lilacs masked the speckled brick and stucco of the college buildings, spiræa made a flashing wall, and from the Kansas fields came soft airs and the whistle of meadow larks.
Students loafed at their windows, calling down to friends; they played catch on the campus; they went bareheaded and wrote a great deal of poetry; and the Terwillinger baseball team defeated Fogelquist College.
Still Elmer did not receive his divine Call.
By day, playing catch, kicking up his heels, belaboring his acquaintances, singing “The happiest days that ever were, we knew at old Terwillinger” on a fence fondly believed to resemble the Yale fence, or tramping by himself through the minute forest of cottonwood and willow by Tunker Creek, he expanded with the expanding year and knew happiness.
The nights were unadulterated hell.
He felt guilty that he had no Call, and he went to the president about it in mid-May.
Dr. Quarles was thoughtful, and announced;
“Brother Elmer, the last thing I’d ever want to do, in fairness to the spirit of the ministry, would be to create an illusion of a Call when there was none present. That would be like the pagan hallucinations worked on the poor suffering followers of Roman Catholicism. Whatever else he may be, a Baptist preacher must be free from illusions; he must found his work on good hard scientific facts—the proven facts of the Bible, and substitutionary atonement, which even pragmatically we know to be true, because it works. No, no! But at the same time I feel sure the voice of God is calling you, if you can but hear it, and I want to help you lift the veil of worldliness which still, no doubt, deafens your inner ear. Will you come to my house tomorrow evening? We’ll take the matter to the Lord in prayer.”
It was all rather dreadful.
That kindly spring evening, with a breeze fresh in the branches of the sycamores, President Quarles had shut the windows and drawn the blinds in his living-room, an apartment filled with crayon portraits of Baptist worthies, red-plush chairs, and leaded-glass unit bookcases containing the lay writings of the more poetic clergy. The president had gathered as assistants in prayer the more aged and fundamentalist ex-pastors on the faculty and the more milky and elocutionary of the Y.M.C.A. leaders, headed by Eddie Fislinger.
When Elmer entered, they were on their knees, their arms on the seats of reversed chairs, their heads bowed, all praying aloud and together. They looked up at him like old women surveying the bride. He wanted to bolt. Then the president nabbed him, and had him down on his knees, suffering and embarrassed and wondering what the devil to pray about.
They took turns at telling God what he ought to do in the case of “our so ardently and earnestly seeking brother.”
“Now will you lift your voice in prayer, Brother Elmer? Just let yourself go. Remember we’re all with you, all loving and helping you,” grated the president.
They crowded near him. The president put his stiff old arm about Elmer’s shoulder. It felt like a dry bone, and the president smelled of kerosene. Eddie crowded up on the other side and nuzzled against him. The others crept in, patting him. It was horribly hot in that room, and they were so close—he felt as if he were tied down in a hospital ward. He looked up and saw the long shaven face, the thin tight lips, of a minister … whom he was now to emulate.
He prickled with horror, but he tried to pray. He wailed, “O blessed Lord, help me to—help me to—”
He had an enormous idea. He sprang up. He cried, “Say, I think the spirit is beginning to work and maybe if I just went out and took a short walk and kinda prayed by myself, while you stayed here and prayed for me, it might help.”
“I don’t think that would be the way,” began the president, but the most aged faculty-member suggested, “Maybe it’s the Lord’s guidance. We hadn’t ought to interfere with the Lord’s guidance, Brother Quarles.”
“That’s so, that’s so,” the president announced. “You have your walk, Brother Elmer, and pray hard, and we’ll stay here and besiege the throne of grace for you.”
Elmer blundered out into the fresh clean air.
Whatever happened, he was never going back! How he hated their soft, crawly, wet hands!
He had notions of catching the last train to Cato and getting solacingly drunk. No. He’d lose his degree, just a month off now, and be cramped later in appearing as a real, high-class, college-educated lawyer.
Lose it, then! Anything but go back to their crawling creepy hands, their aged breathing by his ear—
He’d get hold of somebody and say he felt sick and send him back to tell Prexy and sneak off to bed. Cinch! He just wouldn’t get his Call, just pass it up, by Jiminy, and not have to go into the ministry.
But to lose the chance to stand before thousands and stir them by telling about divine love and the evening and morning star—If he could just stand it till he got through theological seminary and was on the job—Then, if any Eddie Fislinger tried to come into his study and breathe down his neck—throw him out, by golly!
He was conscious that he was leaning against a tree, tearing down twigs, and that facing him under a streetlamp was Jim Lefferts.
“You look sick, Hellcat,” said Jim.
Elmer strove for dignity, then broke, with a moaning, “Oh, I am! What did I ever get into this religious fix for?”
“What they doing to you? Never mind; don’t tell me. You need a drink.”
“By God, I do!”
“I’ve got a quart of first-rate corn whisky from a moonshiner I’ve dug up out here in the country, and my room’s right in this block. Come along.”
Through his first drink, Elmer was quiet, bewildered, vaguely leaning on the Jim who would guide him away from this horror.
But he was out of practice in drinking, and the whisky took hold with speed. By the middle of the second glass he was boasting of his ecclesiastical eloquence, he was permitting Jim to know that never in Terwillinger College had there appeared so promising an orator, that right now they were there praying for him, waiting for him, the president and the whole outfit!
“But,” with a slight return of apology, “I suppose prob’ly you think maybe I hadn’t ought to go back to ’em.”
Jim was standing by the open window, saying slowly, “No. I think now—You’d better go back. I’ve got some peppermints. They’ll fix your breath, more or less. Goodbye, Hellcat.”
He had won even over old Jim!
He was master of the world, and only a very little bit drunk.
He stepped out high and happy. Everything was extremely beautiful. How high the trees were! What a wonderful drugstore window, with all those glossy new magazine covers! That distant piano—magic. What exquisite young women the co-eds! What lovable and sturdy men the students! He was at peace with everything. What a really good fellow he was! He’d lost all his meannesses. How kind he’d been to that poor lonely sinner, Jim Lefferts. Others might despair of Jim’s soul—he never would.
Poor old Jim. His room had looked terrible—that narrow little room with a cot, all in disorder, a pair of shoes and a corncob pipe lying on a pile of books. Poor Jim. He’d forgive him. Go around and clean up the room for him.
(Not that Elmer had ever cleaned up their former room.)
Gee, what a lovely spring night! How corking those old boys were, Prexy and everybody, to give up an evening and pray for him!
Why was it he felt so fine? Of course! The Call had come! God had come to him, though just spiritually, not corporeally, so far as he remembered. It had come! He could go ahead and rule the world!
He dashed into the president’s house; he shouted from the door, erect, while they knelt and looked up at him mousily, “It’s come! I feel it in everything! God just opened my eyes and made me feel what a wonderful ole world it is, and it was just like I could hear his voice saying, ‘Don’t you want to love everybody and help them to be happy? Do you want to just go along being selfish, or have you got a longing to—to help everybody?’ ”
He stopped. They had listened silently, with interested grunts of “Amen, Brother.”
“Honest, it was awful impressive. Somehow, something has made me feel so much better than when I went away from here. I’m sure it was a real Call. Don’t you think so, President?”
“Oh, I’m sure of it!” the president ejaculated, getting up hastily and rubbing his knees.
“I feel that all is right with our brother; that he has now, this sacred moment, heard the voice of God, and is entering upon the highest calling in the sight of God,” the president observed to the dean. “Don’t you feel so?”
“God be praised,” said the dean, and looked at his watch.