“That was a dirty trick of Eddie’s!” said Jim.
“God, it certainly was! Trying to convert me! Right before those muckers! If I ever hear another yip out of Eddie, I’ll knock his block off! Nerve of him, trying to lead me up to any mourners’ bench! Fat chance! I’ll fix him! Come on, show a little speed!” asserted the brother to all them that were oppressed.
By the time for their late evening train, the sound conversation of the bartender and the sound qualities of his Bourbon had caused Elmer and Jim to forget Eddie Fislinger and the horrors of undressing religion in public. They were the more shocked, then, swaying in their seat in the smoker, to see Eddie standing by them, Bible in hand, backed by his two beaming partners in evangelism.
Eddie bared his teeth, smiled all over his watery eyes, and caroled:
“Oh, fellows, you don’t know how wonderful you were tonight! But, oh, boys, now you’ve taken the first step, why do you put it off—why do you hesitate—why do you keep the Savior suffering as he waits for you, longs for you? He needs you boys, with your splendid powers and intellects that we admire so—”
“This air,” observed Jim Lefferts, “is getting too thick for me. I seem to smell a peculiar and a fishlike smell.” He slipped out of the seat and marched toward the forward car.
Elmer sought to follow him, but Eddie had flopped into Jim’s place and was blithely squeaking on, while the other two hung over them with tender Y. M. C. A. smiles very discomforting to Elmer’s queasy stomach as the train bumped on.
For all his brave words, Elmer had none of Jim’s resolute contempt for the church. He was afraid of it. It connoted his boyhood. . . . His mother, drained by early widowhood and drudgery, finding her only emotion in hymns and the Bible, and weeping when he failed to study his Sunday School lesson. The church, full thirty dizzy feet up to its curiously carven rafters, and the preachers, so overwhelming in their wallowing voices, so terrifying in their pictures of little boys who stole watermelons or indulged in biological experiments behind barns. The awe-oppressed moment of his second conversion, at the age of eleven, when, weeping with embarrassment and the prospect of losing so much fun, surrounded by solemn and whiskered adult faces, he had signed a pledge binding him to give up, forever, the joys of profanity, alcohol, cards, dancing, and the theater.
These clouds hung behind and over him, for all his boldness.
Eddie Fislinger, the human being, he despised. He considered him a grasshopper, and with satisfaction considered stepping on him. But Eddie Fislinger, the gospeler, fortified with just such a pebble-leather Bible (bookmarks of fringed silk and celluloid smirking from the pages) as his Sunday School teachers had wielded when they assured him that God was always creeping about to catch small boys in their secret thoughts—this armored Eddie was an official, and Elmer listened to him uneasily, never quite certain that he might not yet find himself a dreadful person leading a pure and boresome life in a clean frock coat.