I told him that to my knowledge there was not ten cents in the whole outfit, and suggested that he give the cigars to the soldiers and look to Heaven for payment. But he would not; he said that he had brought the cigars to the line to sell and that he had to have the money for them. So I did the thing that seemed best under the circumstances. I took his cigars away from him, the sergeant headed him for Division Headquarters, and I kicked him as hard as I could in the pants. The last I saw of him, he was stumbling down the hill toward the crossroad vowing vengeance. But I paid little attention to him; I was busy handing out free cigars, and a few minutes later everybody at the farm was puffing happily.
We had also in Farmington three denominational schools, Elmwood Seminary, a girl’s college with primary and grammar departments for both sexes, operated by the Presbyterians across the street from their church; Carleton College in the lower end of the town, a Northern Methodist institution, and Baptist College, near the Baptist church. Carleton and Baptist were coeducational. I was educated—God save the mark!—at Elmwood and Carleton, and at both there was much emphasis on religious teaching. Carleton, of course, since it was run by the Northern Methodists, was frankly a mill for grinding out workers for the Lord, and they poured out of the hopper in large numbers for many years. Gawky country boys came from the farms around Bull Run, Hazel Run and French Village, and down-state toward Libertyville and Fredericktown, and entered Carleton College, to emerge a few years later rip-snorting evangelists hot on the trail of the Devil. Those who did not become professional Satan-chasers developed, in the course of time, into pussyfooting Brothers with keen ears for scandal, gimlet eyes for boring searchingly and suspiciously into all amusement and pleasure, and wagging tongues for scattering seeds of holiness. And God made their teeth very sharp, for backbiting.
Curiously enough, the Presbyterians in Farmington comprised the liberal element, in so far as we had a liberal element. This was because our wealthy families, or at least our social leaders, were apparently Episcopalians at heart and perhaps belonged to the Presbyterian congregation only because we had no Episcopal church. They were able to go to St. Louis frequently, and did, and consequently acquired a bit of metropolitan polish, and rubbed off some of our small-town intolerance and roughness. From time to time rumors were afloat that some of these people had been seen entering Episcopal churches in St. Louis, but I have never heard that they were verified.
But for many years this element had a virtual monopoly of such sinful practices as playing cards, dancing and buggy-riding on the Sabbath. I have heard several Brothers and Sisters, and more than one doleful and sorrowing Preacher, speak regretfully of the unholy spectacle of a young man of one of these families driving a spanking pair through the heart of the town on Sunday afternoon, with an abandoned young woman beside him and neither apparently caring one single damn about the fate of religion. It was prophesied that they could come to no good end. But the germ they planted multiplied enormously.
TABOOS OF THE LORD’S DAY
1
Sunday should be a day of gladness, and of light and beauty, for it is then that the forthright religionist is closest to his God, and when he is, if ever, in communion with the Holy Spirit and presumably receives instruction with which to confound the wicked during the ensuing week. But in small communities which suffer from the blight of religion it never is, and when I was a boy in Farmington Sunday was a day of dreadful gloom; over everything hung an atmosphere of morbid fear and dejection. In the morning the whole town donned its Sunday suit, almost always black and funereal and depressing, and therefore becoming to religious practice, and trudged sorrowfully and solemnly to Sunday School and to church, there to wail doleful hymns and hear an unlearned man “measure with words the immeasurable and sink the string of thought into the fathomless;” and beseech the Lord upon the universal prayer theme of “gimme.” Then the village marched, in mournful cadence, back home for Sunday dinner. But before the meal was eaten the juvenile members of the religious household were commanded to remove their sabbath raiment, and were not again permitted to assume the habiliments of the godly until after supper, when the family clutched its Bibles and wandered forth despairingly to evening service.
These excursions, with attendance upon the various meetings of the young people’s societies and other church organizations, comprised almost the sum total of the Sunday activity of our town’s inhabitants. In recent years the young folks there appear to have gone wholeheartedly to the Devil, and are gallivanting about the country in automobiles, listening to radios, dancing, attending baseball games on the Sabbath and otherwise disporting themselves in a sinful manner, but in my youth we had to observe a very definite list of Sunday taboos, in addition to the special don’ts laid down by the more devout families, according to their fear of God and the fervor of their belief.
We could not play card games on Sunday. Regulation playing cards of course, were taboo at all times in the best and most religious families, for God, we were told, had informed the Preacher that cards were an invention of the Devil, designed to lure true believers into sin; but on Sunday we could not even play such games as Lotto, Old Maid and Authors. On week days these were considered very amusing and instructive pastimes, although in some quarters it was felt that they caused too much laughter, but if anyone so much as thought of them on Sunday he was headed for Hell.
The taboo against drinking was in effect every day in the week for the godly and their children, not on account of the possible harmful physical effects of liquor, but because God objected. And even the Town Sot hesitated to take a drink on Sunday, for he knew that every Preacher and every Brother and Sister would be howling to God to damn his immortal soul and make a horrible example out of him. And how they did love horrible examples!