But he must not stand there gaping and wondering before his gaping and wondering congregation. He must push on to his lastly's. His mind retraced his words, and he repeated:
"What are the fleeting torments of this tenement of clay, mere bone and flesh, to the soul's despair? Nothing! As I said before—nothing!"
And then he understood why Irene Straley had walked out. The realization deranged him so that only the police-force every one has among his faculties coerced him into going on with his sermon.
It was a good sermon. It was his own, too; for at last he had paid the final instalment on the clergyman's library which contained a thousand sermons as aids to overworked, underinspired evangelists. He had built this discourse from well-seasoned timbers. He had used it in two pulpits where he had visited, and now he was giving it to his own flock. He knew it well enough to trust his oratorical machinery with its delivery, while the rest of his mind meditated other things.
Often, while preaching, a portion of his brain would be watching the effect on his congregation, another watching the clock, another thinking of dinner, another musing over the scandals he knew in the lives of the parishioners.
But now all his by-thoughts were scattered at the abrupt deed of Irene Straley. She was the traffic of his other brains now, while his lips went on enouncing the phrases of his discourse and his fists thudded the Bible for emphasis. He was remembering his boyhood and his infatuation for Irene Straley. That was before he was sure of his call to the ministry. If he had married her, he might not have heard the call.
Doctor Crosson hoped that he was not regretting that sacrament! Sweat came out on his brow as he understood the blasphemy of noting (even here on the rostrum with his mouth pouring forth sacred eloquence) that Irene Straley as she marched out of the church was still slender and flexile, virginal. Doctor Crosson mopped his brow at the atrocity of his thoughts this morning. The springtime air was to blame. The windows were open for the first time. The breeze that lolled through the church had no right there. It was irreverent and frivolous. It was amused at the people. It rippled with laughter at the preacher's heavy effort to start a jealousy between the pangs of the flesh and the pangs of the soul.
It brought into church a savor of green rushes growing in the warm, wet thickets where Doctor Crosson—once Eddie Crosson—had loved to go hunting squirrels and rabbits, and wild duck in season. Those were years of depravity, but they were entrancing in memory. He felt a Satanic whisper: "Order these old fogies out into the fields and let them worship there. It is May, you fool!"
"You fool!" That was what Irene Straley had seemed to whisper. Only, the breeze made a soft, sweet coo of the word that had been so bitter on her lips.
Across the square of a window near the pulpit a venerable locust-tree brandished a bough dripping with blossoms. Countless little censers of white spice swung frankincense and myrrh for pagan nostrils.