I
IT was during his inquiry about clerical allies and rivals—they were
the same thing—that Elmer learned that two of his classmates at Mizpah
Seminary were stationed in Zenith.
Wallace Umstead, the Mizpah student-instructor in gymnastics, was now
general secretary of the Zenith Y. M. C. A.
“He’s a boob. We can pass him up,” Elmer decided. “Husky but no finesse
and culture. No. That’s wrong. Preacher can get a lot of publicity
speaking at the Y., and get the fellows to join his church.”
So he called on Mr. Umstead, and that was a hearty and touching meeting
between classmates, two strong men come face to face, two fellow manly
Christians.
But Elmer was not pleased to learn of the presence of the second
classmate, Frank Shallard. He angrily recalled: “Sure—the fellow that
high-hatted me and sneaked around and tried to spy on me when I was
helping him learn the game at Schoenheim.”
He was glad to hear that Frank was in disgrace with the sounder and
saner clergy of Zenith. He had left the Baptist Church; it was said that
he had acted in a low manner as a common soldier in the Great War; and
he had gone as pastor to a Congregational Church in Zenith—not a
God-fearing, wealthy Congregational Church, like that of Dr. G. Prosper
Edwards, but one that was suspected of being as shaky and cowardly and
misleading as any Unitarian fold.
Elmer remembered that he still owed Frank the hundred dollars which he
had borrowed to reach Zenith for the last of his Prosperity lectures. He
was furious to remember it. He couldn’t pay it, not now, with a
motor-car just bought and only half paid for! But was it safe to make an
enemy of this crank Shallard, who might go around shooting his mouth off
and telling a lot of stories—not more’n half of ’em true?
He groaned with martyrdom, made out a check for a hundred—it was
one-half of his present bank-balance—and sent it to Frank with a note
explaining that for years he had yearned to return this money, but he
had lost Frank’s address. Also, he would certainly call on his dear
classmate just as soon as he got time.
“And that’ll be about sixteen years after the Day of Judgment,” he
snorted.
II
Not all the tenderness, all the serene uprightness, all the mystic
visions of Andrew Pengilly, that village saint, had been able to keep
Frank Shallard satisfied with the Baptist ministry after his association
with the questioning rabbi and the Unitarian minister at Eureka. These
liberals proved admirably the assertion of the Baptist fundamentalists
that to tamper with biology and ethnology was to lose one’s Baptist
faith, wherefore State University education should be confined to
algebra, agriculture, and Bible study.
Early in 1917, when it was a question as to whether he would leave his
Baptist church or be kicked out, Frank was caught by the drama of
war—caught, in his wavering, by what seemed strength—and he resigned,
for all of Bess’ bewildered protests; he sent her and the children back
to her father, and enlisted as a private soldier.
Chaplain? No! He wanted, for the first time, to be normal and
uninsulated.
Through the war he was kept as a clerk in camp in America. He was
industrious, quick, accurate, obedient; he rose to a sergeancy and
learned to smoke; he loyally brought his captain home whenever he was
drunk; and he read half a hundred volumes of science.
And all the time he hated it.
He hated the indignity of being herded with other men, no longer a
person of leisure and dignity and command, whose idiosyncrasies were
important to himself and to other people, but a cog, to be hammered
brusquely the moment it made any rattle of individuality. He hated the
seeming planlessness of the whole establishment. If this was a war to
end war, he heard nothing of it from any of his fellow soldiers or his
officers.
But he learned to be easy and common with common men. He learned not
even to hear cursing. He learned to like large males more given to
tobacco-chewing than to bathing, and innocent of all words longer than
“hell.” He found himself so devoted to the virtues of these common
people that he wanted “to do something for them”—and in bewildered
reflection he could think of no other way of “doing something for them”
than to go on preaching.
But not among the Baptists, with their cast-iron minds.
Nor yet could he quite go over to the Unitarians. He still revered Jesus
of Nazareth as the one path to justice and kindness, and he
still—finding even as in childhood a magic in the stories of shepherds
keeping watch by night, of the glorified mother beside the babe in the
manger—he still had an unreasoned feeling that Jesus was of more than
human birth, and veritably the Christ.
It seemed to him that the Congregationalists were the freest among the
more or less trinitarian denominations. Each Congregational church made
its own law. The Baptists were supposed to, but they were ruled by a
grim general opinion.
After the war he talked to the state superintendent of Congregational
churches of Winnemac. Frank wanted a free church, and a poor church, but
not poor because it was timid and lifeless.
They would, said the superintendent, be glad to welcome him among the
Congregationalists, and there was available just the flock Frank wanted:
the Dorchester Church, on the edge of Zenith. The parishioners were
small shopkeepers and factory foremen and skilled workmen and
railwaymen, with a few stray music-teachers and insurance agents. They
were mostly poor; and they had the reputation of really wanting the
truth from the pulpit.
When Elmer arrived, Frank had been at the Dorchester Church for two
years, and he had been nearly happy.
He found that the grander among his fellow Congregational pastors—such
as G. Prosper Edwards, with his down-town plush-lined cathedral—could
be shocked almost as readily as the Baptists by a suggestion that we
didn’t really quite _know_ about the virgin birth. He found that the
worthy butchers and haberdashers of his congregation did not radiate joy
at a defense of Bolshevik Russia. He found that he was still not at all
certain that he was doing any good, aside from providing the drug of
religious hope to timorous folk frightened of hell-fire and afraid to
walk alone.
But to be reasonably free, to have, after army life, the fleecy comfort
of a home with jolly Bess and the children, this was oasis, and for
three years Frank halted in his fumbling for honesty.
Even more than Bess, the friendship of Dr. Philip McGarry, of the Arbor
Methodist Church, kept Frank in the ministry.
McGarry was three or four years younger than Frank, but in his sturdy
cheerfulness he seemed more mature. Frank had met him at the Ministerial
Alliance’s monthly meeting, and they had liked in each other a certain
disdainful honesty. McGarry was not to be shocked by what biology did to
Genesis, by the suggestion that certain Christian rites had been stolen
from Mithraic cults, by Freudianism, by any social heresies, yet McGarry
loved the church, as a comradely gathering of people alike hungry for
something richer than daily selfishness, and this love he passed on to
Frank.
But Frank still resented it that, as a parson, he was considered not
quite virile; that even clever people felt they must treat him with a
special manner; that he was barred from knowing the real thoughts and
sharing the real desires of normal humanity.
And when he received Elmer’s note of greeting he groaned, “Oh, Lord, I
wonder if people ever class me with a fellow like Gantry?”
He suggested to Bess, after a spirited account of Elmer’s eminent
qualities for spiritual and amorous leadership, “I feel like sending his
check back to him.”
“Let’s see it,” said Bess and, placing the check in her stocking, she
observed derisively, “There’s a new suit for Michael, and a lovely
dinner for you and me, and a new lip-stick, and money in the bank.
Cheers! I adore you, Reverend Shallard, I worship you, I adhere to you
in all Christian fidelity, but let me tell you, my lad, it wouldn’t hurt
you one bit if you had some of Elmer’s fast technique in love-making!”