How familiar they were, how thrilling, how explanatory to Elmer of the purposes of life, how preparatory for his future usefulness and charm.
The church, the Sunday School, the evangelistic orgy, choir-practise, raising the mortgage, the delights of funerals, the snickers in back pews or in the other room at weddings—they were as natural, as inescapable a mold of manners to Elmer as Catholic processionals to a street gamin in Naples.
The Baptist Church of Paris, Kansas! A thousand blurred but indestructible pictures.
Hymns! Elmer’s voice was made for hymns. He rolled them out like a negro. The organ-thunder of “Nicæa”:
Holy, holy, holy! all the saints adore thee,
Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.
The splendid rumble of the Doxology. “Throw Out the Lifeline,” with its picture of a wreck pounded in the darkness by surf which the prairie child imagined as a hundred feet high. “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” to which you could without rebuke stamp your feet.
Sunday School picnics! Lemonade and four-legged races and the ride on the hay-rack, singing “Seeing Nelly Home.”
Sunday School text cards! True, they were chiefly a medium of gambling, but as Elmer usually won the game (he was the first boy in Paris to own a genuine pair of loaded dice) he had plenty of them in his gallery, and they gave him a taste for gaudy robes, for marble columns and the purple-broidered palaces of kings, which was later to be of value in quickly habituating himself to the more decorative homes of vice. The three kings bearing caskets of ruby and sardonyx. King Zedekiah in gold and scarlet, kneeling on a carpet of sapphire-blue, while his men-at-arms came fleeing and blood-stained, red blood on glancing steel, with tidings of the bannered host of Nebuchadnezzar, great king of Babylon. And all his life Elmer remembered, in moments of ardor, during oratorios in huge churches, during sunset at sea, a black-bearded David standing against raw red cliffs—a figure heroic and summoning to ambition, to power, to domination.
Sunday School Christmas Eve! The exhilaration of staying up, and publicly, till nine-thirty. The tree, incredibly tall, also incredibly inflammable, flashing with silver cords, with silver stars, with cotton-batting snow. The two round stoves red-hot. Lights and lights and lights. Pails of candy, and for every child in the school a present—usually a book, very pleasant, with colored pictures of lambs and volcanoes. The Santa Claus—he couldn’t possibly be Lorenzo Nickerson, the house-painter, so bearded was he, and red-cheeked, and so witty in his comment on each child as it marched up for its present. The enchantment, sheer magic, of the Ladies’ Quartette singing of shepherds who watched their flocks by nights . . . brown secret hilltops under one vast star.