I
HOWEVER impatient he was with Frank, Philip McGarry’s last wish was to
set Elmer Gantry piously baying on Frank’s trail. It was rather an
accident. Philip sat next to Elmer at a dinner to discuss missionary
funds; he remembered that Frank and Elmer had been classmates; and with
a sincerely affectionate “It’s too bad the poor boy worries so over what
are really matters for Faith,” he gave away to Elmer most of Frank’s
heresies.
Now in the bustle of raising funds to build a vast new church, Elmer had
forgotten his notion of saving the renowned hardware impresario, Mr.
William Dollinger Styles, and his millions from contamination by Frank’s
blasphemies.
“We could use old Styles, and you could get some fine publicity by
attacking Shallard’s attempt to steal Jesus and even Hell away from us,”
said Elmer’s confidant, Mr. T. J. Rigg, when he was consulted.
“Say, that’s great. How liberalism leads to atheism. Fine! Wait till Mr.
Frank Shallard opens his mouth and puts his foot in it again!” said the
Reverend Elmer Gantry. “Say, I wonder how we could get a report of his
sermons? The poor fish isn’t important enough so’s they very often
report his junk in the papers.”
“I’ll take care of that. I’ve got a girl in my office, good fast worker,
that I’ll have go and take down all his sermons. They’ll just think
she’s practising stenography.”
“Well, by golly, that’s _one_ good use for sermons. Ha, ha, ha!” said
Elmer.
“Yes, sir, by golly, found at last. Ha, ha, ha!” said Mr. T. J. Rigg.
II
In less than a month Frank maddened the citizens of Zenith by asserting,
in the pulpit, that though he was in favor of temperance, he was not for
Prohibition; that the methods of the Anti-Saloon League were those of a
lumber lobby.
Elmer had his chance.
He advertised that he would speak on “Fake Preachers—and Who They Are.”
In his sermon he said that Frank Shallard (by name) was a liar, a fool,
an ingrate whom he had tried to help in seminary, a thief who was trying
to steal Christ from an ailing world.
The newspapers were pleased and explicit.
Elmer saw to it—T. J. Rigg arranged a foursome—that he played golf
with William Dollinger Styles that week.
“I was awfully sorry, Mr. Styles,” he said, “to feel it my duty to jump
on your pastor, Mr. Shallard, last Sunday, but when a fellow stands up
and makes fun of Jesus Christ—well, it’s time to forget mercy!”
“I thought you were kind of hard on him. I didn’t hear his sermon
myself—I’m a church-member, but it does seem like things pile up so at
the office that I have to spend almost every Sunday morning there. But
from what they’ve told me, he wasn’t so wild.”
“Then you don’t think Shallard is practically an atheist?”
“Why, no! Nice decent fellow—”
“Mr. Styles, do you realize that all over town people are wondering how
a man like you can give his support to a man like Shallard? Do you
realize that not only the ministers but also laymen are saying that
Shallard is secretly both an agnostic and a socialist, though he’s
afraid to come out and admit it? I hear it everywhere. People are afraid
to tell you. Jiminy, I’m kind of scared of you myself! Feel I’ve got a
lot of nerve!”
“Well, I ain’t so fierce,” said Mr. Styles, very pleased.
“Anyway, I’d hate to have you think I was sneaking around damning
Shallard behind his back. Why don’t you do this? You and some of the
other Dorchester deacons have Shallard for lunch or dinner, and have me
there, and let me put a few questions to him. I’ll talk to the fellow
straight! Do you feel you can afford to be known as tolerating an
infidel in your church? Oughtn’t you to make him come out from under
cover and admit what he thinks? If I’m wrong, I’ll apologize to you and
to him, and you can call me all the kinds of nosey, meddling, cranky,
interfering fool you want to!”
“Well—— He seems kind of a nice fellow.” Mr. Styles was
uncomfortable. “But if you’re right about him being really an infidel,
don’t know’s I could stand that.”
“How’d it be if you and some of your deacons and Shallard came and had
dinner with me in a private room at the Athletic Club next Friday
evening?”
“Well, all right—”
III
Frank was so simple as to lose his temper when Elmer had bullied him,
roared at him, bulked at him, long enough, with Frank’s own deacons
accepting Elmer as an authority. He was irritated out of all caution,
and he screamed back at Elmer that he did not accept Jesus Christ as
divine; that he was not sure of a future life; that he wasn’t even
certain of a personal God.
Mr. William Dollinger Styles snapped, “Then just why, Mr. Shallard,
don’t you get out of the ministry before you’re kicked out?”
“Because I’m not yet sure—— Though I do think our present churches
are as absurd as a belief in witchcraft, yet I believe there could be a
church free of superstition, helpful to the needy, and giving people
that mystic something stronger than reason, that sense of being uplifted
in common worship of an unknowable power for good. Myself, I’d be lonely
with nothing but bleak debating-societies. I think—at least I still
think—that for many souls there is this need of worship, even of
beautiful ceremonial—”
“‘Mystic need of worship!’ ‘Unknowable power for good!’ Words, words,
words! Milk and water! _That_, when you have the glorious and certain
figure of Christ Jesus to worship and follow!” bellowed Elmer. “Pardon
me, gentlemen, for intruding, but it makes me, not as a preacher but
just as a humble and devout Christian, sick to my stomach to hear a
fellow feel that he knows so blame’ much he’s able to throw out of the
window the Christ that the whole civilized world has believed in for
countless centuries! And try to replace him with a lot of gassy phrases!
Excuse me, Mr. Styles, but after all, religion is a serious business,
and if we’re going to call ourselves Christians at all, we have to bear
testimony to the proven fact of God. Forgive me.”
“It’s quite all right, Dr. Gantry. I know just how you feel,” said
Styles. “And while I’m no authority on religion, I feel the same way you
do, and I guess these other gentlemen do, too. . . . Now, Shallard,
you’re entitled to your own views, but not in our pulpit! Why don’t you
just resign before we kick you out?”
“You can’t kick me out! It takes the whole church to do that!”
“The whole church’ll damn well do it, you watch ’em!” said Deacon
William Dollinger Styles.
IV
“What are we going to do, dear?” Bess said wearily. “I’ll stand by you,
of course, but let’s be practical. Don’t you think it would make less
trouble if you did resign?”
“I’ve done nothing for which to resign! I’ve led a thoroughly decent
life. I haven’t lied or been indecent or stolen. I’ve preached
imagination, happiness, justice, seeking for the truth. I’m no sage,
Heaven knows, but I’ve given my people a knowledge that there are such
things as ethnology and biology, that there are books like ‘Ethan Frome’
and ‘Père Goriot’ and ‘Tono-Bungay’ and Renan’s Jesus, that there is
nothing wicked in looking straight at life—”
“Dear, I said _practical_!”
“Oh, thunder, I don’t know. I think I can get a job in the Charity
Organization Society here—the general secretary happens to be pretty
liberal.”
“I hate to have us leave the church entirely. I’m sort of at home there.
Why not see if they’d like to have you in the Unitarian Church?”
“Too respectable. Scared. Same old sanctified phrases I’m trying to get
rid of—and won’t ever quite get rid of, I’m afraid.”
V
A meeting of the church body had been called to decide on Frank’s
worthiness, and the members had been informed by Styles that Frank was
attacking all religion. Instantly a number of the adherents who had been
quite unalarmed by what they themselves had heard in the pulpit
perceived that Frank was a dangerous fellow and more than likely to
injure omnipotent God.
Before the meeting, one woman, who remained fond of him, fretted to
Frank, “Oh, can’t you understand what a dreadful thing you’re doing to
question the divinity of Christ and all? I’m afraid you’re going to hurt
religion permanently. If you could open your eyes and see—if you could
only understand what my religion has meant to me in times of despair! I
don’t know what I would have done during my typhoid without that
consolation! You’re a bright, smart man when you let yourself be. If
you’d only go and have a good talk with Dr. G. Prosper Edwards. He’s an
older man than you, and he’s a doctor of divinity, and he has such huge
crowds at Pilgrim Church, and I’m sure he could show you where you’re
wrong and make everything perfectly clear to you.”
Frank’s sister, married now to an Akron lawyer, came to stay with them.
They had been happy, Frank and she, in the tepid but amiable house of
their minister-father; they had played at church, with dolls and
salt-cellars for congregation; books were always about them, natural to
them; and at their father’s table they had heard doctors, preachers,
lawyers, politicians, talk of high matters.
The sister bubbled to Bess, “You know, Frank doesn’t believe half he
says! He just likes to show off. He’s a real good Christian at heart, if
he only knew it. Why, he was such a good Christian boy—he led the B. Y.
P. U.—he _couldn’t_ have drifted away from Christ into all this
nonsense that nobody takes seriously except a lot of long-haired dirty
cranks! And he’ll break his father’s heart! I’m going to have a good
talk with that young man, and bring him to his senses!”
On the street Frank met the great Dr. McTiger, pastor of the Royal Ridge
Presbyterian Church.
Dr. McTiger had been born in Scotland, graduated at Edinburgh, and he
secretly—not too secretly—despised all American universities and
seminaries and their alumni. He was a large, impatient, brusque man,
renowned for the length of his sermons.
“I hear, young man,” he shouted at Frank, “that you have read one whole
book on the pre-Christian mysteries and decided that our doctrines are
secondhand and that you are now going to destroy the church. You should
have more pity! With the loss of a profound intellect like yours, my
young friend, I should doubt if the church can stagger on! It’s a pity
that after discovering scholarship you didn’t go on and get enough of
that same scholarship to perceive that by the wondrous beneficence of
God’s mercy the early church was led to combine many alien factors in
the one perfection of the Christian brotherhood! I don’t know whether
it’s ignorance of church history or lack of humor that chiefly
distinguishes you, my young friend! Go and sin no more!”
From Andrew Pengilly came a scrawled, shaky letter begging Frank to
stand true and not deliver his appointed flock to the devil. That hurt.
VI
The first church business meeting did not settle the question of Frank’s
remaining. He was questioned about his doctrines, and he shocked them by
being candid, but the men whom he had helped, the women whom he had
consoled in sickness, the fathers who had gone to him when their
daughters “had gotten into trouble,” stood by him for all the threats of
Styles.
A second meeting would have to be called before they took a vote.
When Elmer read of this, he galloped to T. J. Rigg. “Here’s our chance!”
he gloated. “If the first meeting had kicked Frank out, Styles might
have stayed with their church, though I do think he likes my brand of
theology and my Republican politics. But why don’t you go to him now, T.
J., and hint around about how his church has insulted him?”
“All right, Elmer. Another soul saved. Brother Styles has still got the
first dollar he ever earned, but maybe we can get ten cents of it away
from him for the new church. Only—Him being so much richer than I, I
hope you won’t go to him for spiritual advice and inspiration, instead
of me.”
“You bet I won’t, T. J.! Nobody has ever accused Elmer Gantry of being
disloyal to his friends! My only hope is that your guidance of this
church has been of some value to you yourself.”
“Well—yes—in a way. I’ve had three brother Methodist clients from
Wellspring come to me—two burglary and one forgery. But it’s more that
I just like to make the wheels go round.”
Mr. Rigg was saying, an hour later, to Mr. William Dollinger Styles, “If
you came and joined us, I know you’d like it—you’ve seen what a fine,
upstanding, two-fisted, one-hundred-percent he-man Dr. Gantry is.
Absolutely sound about business. And it would be a swell rebuke to your
church for not accepting your advice. But we hate to invite you to come
over to us—in fact Dr. Gantry absolutely forbade me to see you—for
fear you’ll think it was just because you’re rich.”
For three days Styles shied, then he was led, trembling, up to the
harness.
Afterward, Dr. G. Prosper Edwards of Pilgrim Congregational said to his
spouse, “Why on earth didn’t _we_ think of going right after Styles and
inviting him to join us? It was so simple we never even thought of it. I
really do feel quite cross. Why didn’t _you_ think of it?”
VII
The second church meeting was postponed. It looked to Elmer as though
Frank would be able to stay on at Dorchester Congregational and thus
defy Elmer as the spiritual and moral leader of the city.
Elmer acted fearlessly.
In sermon after sermon he spoke of “that bunch of atheists out there at
Dorchester.” Frank’s parishioners were alarmed. They were forced to
explain (only they were never quite sure what they were explaining) to
customers, to neighbors, to fellow lodge-members. They felt disgraced,
and so it was that a second meeting was called.
Now Frank had fancied a spectacular resignation. He heard himself,
standing before a startled audience, proclaiming, “I have decided that
no one in this room, including your pastor, believes in the Christian
religion. Not one of us would turn the other cheek. Not one of us would
sell all that he has and give to the poor. Not one of us would give his
coat to some man who took his overcoat. Every one of us lays up all the
treasure he can. We don’t practise the Christian religion. We don’t
intend to practise it. Therefore, we don’t believe in it. Therefore I
resign, and I advise you to quit lying and disband.”
He saw himself, then, tramping down the aisle among his gaping hearers,
and leaving the church forever.
But: “I’m too tired. Too miserable. And why hurt the poor bewildered
souls? And—— I am so tired.”
He stood up at the beginning of the second meeting and said gently, “I
had refused to resign. I still feel I have an honest right to an honest
pulpit. But I am setting brother against brother. I am not a Cause—I am
only a friend. I have loved you and the work, the sound of friends
singing together, the happiness of meeting on leisurely Sunday mornings.
This I give up. I resign, and I wish I could say, ‘God be with you and
bless you all.’ But the good Christians have taken God and made him into
a menacing bully, and I cannot even say ‘God bless you,’ during this
last moment, in a life given altogether to religion, when I shall ever
stand in a pulpit.”
Elmer Gantry, in his next sermon, said that he was so broad-minded that
he would be willing to receive an Infidel Shallard in his church,
providing he repented.
VIII
When he found that he liked the Charity Organization Society and his
work in that bleak institution no better than his work in the church,
Frank laughed.
“As Bess said! A consistent malcontent! Well, I _am_ consistent, anyway.
And the relief not to be a preacher any more! Not to have to act
sanctimonious! Not to have men consider you an old woman in trousers! To
be able to laugh without watching its effect!”
Frank was given charge, at the C. O. S., of a lodging-house, a woodyard
at which hoboes worked for two hours daily to pay for lodging and
breakfast, and an employment bureau. He knew little about Scientific
Charity, so he was shocked by the icy manner in which his
subordinates—the aged virgin at the inquiry desk, the boss of the
woodyard, the clerk at the lodging-house, the young lady who asked the
applicants about their religion and vices—treated the shambling
unfortunates as criminals who had deliberately committed the crime of
poverty.
They were as efficient and as tender as vermin-exterminators.
In this acid perfection, Frank longed for the mystery that clings to
even the dourest or politest tabernacle. He fell in the way of going
often to the huge St. Dominic’s Catholic Church, of which the eloquent
Father de Pinna was pastor, with Father Matthew Smeesby, the new sort of
American, state-university-bred priest, as assistant pastor and liaison
officer.
St. Dominic’s was, for Zenith, an ancient edifice, and the coal-smoke
from the South Zenith factories had aged the gray stone to a semblance
of historic centuries. The interior, with its dim irregularity, its
lofty roof, the curious shrines, the mysterious door at the top of a
flight of stone steps, unloosed Frank’s imagination. It touched him to
see the people kneeling at any hour. He had never known a church to
which the plain people came for prayer. Despite its dusky magnificence,
they seemed to find in the church their home. And when he saw the gold
and crimson of solemn high mass blazing at the end of the dark aisle,
with the crush of people visibly believing in the presence of God, he
wondered if he had indeed found the worship he had fumblingly sought.
He knew that to believe literally in Purgatory and the Immaculate
Conception, the Real Presence and the authority of the hierarchy, was as
impossible for him as to believe in Zeus.
“But,” he pondered, “isn’t it possible that the whole thing is so
gorgeous a fairy-tale that to criticize it would be like trying to prove
that Jack did not kill the giant? No sane priest could expect a man of
some education to think that saying masses had any effect on souls in
Purgatory; they’d expect him to take the whole thing as one takes a
symphony. And, oh, I am lonely for the fellowship of the church!”
He sought a consultation with Father Matthew Smeesby. They had met, as
fellow ministers, at many dinners.
The good father sat at a Grand Rapids desk, in a room altogether
business-like save for a carved Bavarian cupboard and a crucifix on the
barren plaster wall. Smeesby was a man of forty, a crisper Philip
McGarry.
“You were an American university man, weren’t you, Father?” Frank asked.
“Yes. University of Indiana. Played half-back.”
“Then I think I can talk to you. It seems to me that so many of your
priests are not merely foreign by birth, Poles and whatnot, but they
look down on American _mores_ and want to mold us to their ideas and
ways. But you—— Tell me: Would it be conceivable for an—I won’t say
an intelligent, but at least a reasonably well-read man like myself, who
finds it quite impossible to believe one word of your doctrines—”
“Huh!”
“—but who is tremendously impressed by your ritual and the spirit of
worship—could such a man be received into the Roman Catholic Church,
honestly, with the understanding that to him your dogmas are nothing but
symbols?”
“Most certainly not!”
“Don’t you know any priests who love the Church but don’t literally
believe all the doctrines?”
“I do not! I know no such persons! Shallard, you can’t understand the
authority and reasonableness of the Church. You’re not ready to. You
think too much of your puerile powers of reasoning. You haven’t enough
divine humility to comprehend the ages of wisdom that have gone to
building up this fortress, and you stand outside its walls, one
pitifully lonely little figure, blowing the trumpet of your egotism, and
demanding of the sentry, ‘Take me to your commander. I am graciously
inclined to assist him. Only he must understand that I think his granite
walls are pasteboard, and I reserve the right to blow them down when I
get tired of them.’ Man, if you were a prostitute or a murderer and came
to me saying ‘Can I be saved?’ I’d cry ‘Yes!’ and give my life to
helping you. But you’re obsessed by a worse crime than murder—pride of
intellect! And yet you haven’t such an awfully overpowering intellect to
be proud of, and I’m not sure but that’s the worst crime of all!
Good-day!”
He added, as Frank ragingly opened the door, “Go home and pray for
simplicity.”
“Go home and pray that I may be made like you? Pray to have your
humility and your manners?” said Frank.
It was a fortnight later that for his own satisfaction Frank set down in
the note-book which he had always carried for sermon ideas, which he
still carried for the sermons they would never let him preach again, a
conclusion:
“The Roman Catholic Church is superior to the militant Protestant
Church. It does not compel you to give up your sense of beauty, your
sense of humor, or your pleasant vices. It merely requires you to give
up your honesty, your reason, your heart and soul.”
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 easy-going 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 any one who disagrees with him is a
Judas.”
“That’s enough!” cried some one 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 tow-rope.”
“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.
X
Consciousness returned waveringly as dawn crawled over the cornfield and
the birds were derisive. Frank’s only clear emotion was a longing to
escape from this agony by death. His whole face reeked with pain. He
could not understand why he could scarce see. When he fumblingly raised
his hand, he discovered that his right eye was a pulp of blind flesh,
and along his jaw he could feel the exposed bone.
He staggered along the path through the cornfield, stumbling over
hummocks, lying there sobbing, muttering, “Bess—oh, come—_Bess_!”
His strength lasted him just to the highroad, and he sloped to earth,
lay by the road like a drunken beggar. A motor was coming, but when the
driver saw Frank’s feebly uplifted arm he sped on. Pretending to be hurt
was a device of hold-up men.
“Oh, God, won’t anybody help me?” Frank whimpered, and suddenly he was
laughing, a choking twisted laughter. “Yes, I said it, Philip—‘God’ I
said—I suppose it proves I’m a good Christian!”
He rocked and crawled along the road to a cottage. There was a light—a
farmer at early breakfast. “At last!” Frank wept. When the farmer
answered the knock, holding up a lamp, he looked once at Frank, then
screamed and slammed the door.
An hour later a motorcycle policeman found Frank in the ditch, in half
delirium.
“Another drunk!” said the policeman, most cheerfully, snapping the
support in place on his cycle. But as he stooped and saw Frank’s
half-hidden face, he whispered, “Good God Almighty!”
XI
The doctors told him that though the right eye was gone completely, he
might not entirely lose the sight of the other for perhaps a year.
Bess did not shriek when she saw him; she only stood with her hands
shaky at her breast.
She seemed to hesitate before kissing what had been his mouth. But she
spoke cheerfully:
“Don’t you worry about a single thing. I’ll get a job that’ll keep us
going. I’ve already seen the general secretary at the C. O. S. And isn’t
it nice that the kiddies are old enough now to read aloud to you.”
To be read aloud to, the rest of his life . . .
XII
Elmer called and raged, “This is the most outrageous thing I’ve ever
heard of in my life, Frank! Believe me, I’m going to give the fellows
that did this to you the most horrible beating they ever got, right from
my pulpit! Even though it may hinder me in getting money for my new
church—say, we’re going to have a bang-up plant there, right up to
date, cost over half a million dollars, seat over two thousand. But
nobody can shut _me_ up! I’m going to denounce those fiends in a way
_they’ll_ never forget!”
And that was the last Elmer is known ever to have said on the subject,
privately or publicly.