he did not stand by the altar now, uplifted in a vow that he would be good and reverent. He was like the new general manager of a factory as he bustled for the first time through the Wellspring Methodist Church, Zenith, and his first comment was “The plant’s run down—have to buck it up.”
He was accompanied on his inspection by his staff: Miss Bundle, church secretary and personal secretary to himself, a decayed and plaintive lady distressingly free of seductiveness; Miss Weezeger, the deaconess, given to fat and good works; and A. F. Cherry, organist and musical director, engaged only on part time.
He was disappointed that the church could not give him a pastoral assistant or a director of religious education. He’d have them, soon enough—and boss them! Great!
He found an auditorium which would hold sixteen hundred people but which was offensively gloomy in its streaky windows, its brown plaster walls, its cast-iron pillars. The rear wall of the chancel was painted a lugubrious blue scattered with stars which had ceased to twinkle; and the pulpit was of dark oak, crowned with a foolish, tasseled, faded green velvet cushion. The whole auditorium was heavy and forbidding; the stretch of empty brown-grained pews stared at him dolorously.
“Certainly must have been a swell bunch of cheerful Christians that made this layout! I’ll have a new church here in five years—one with some pep to it, and Gothic fixin’s and an up-to-date educational and entertainment plant,” reflected the new priest.
The Sunday School rooms were spacious enough, but dingy, scattered with torn hymn books; the kitchen in the basement, for church suppers, had a rusty ancient stove and piles of chipped dishes. Elmer’s own study and office was airless, and looked out on the flivver-crowded yard of a garage. And Mr. Cherry said the organ was rather more than wheezy.
“Oh, well,” Elmer conferred with himself afterward, “what do I care! Anyway, there’s plenty of room for the crowds, and, believe me, I’m the boy can drag ’em in! . . . God, what a frump that Bundle woman is! One of these days I’ll have a smart girl secretary—a good-looker. Well, hurray, ready for the big work! I’ll show this town what high-class preaching is!”
Not for three days did he chance to think that Cleo might also like to see the church.
II
Though there were nearly four hundred thousand people in Zenith and only nine hundred in Banjo Crossing, Elmer’s reception in the Zenith church basement was remarkably like his reception in the Banjo basement. There were the same rugged, hard-handed brothers, the same ample sisters renowned for making doughnuts, the same brisk little men given to giggling and pious jests. There were the same homemade ice cream and homemade oratory. But there were five times as many people as at the Banjo reception, and Elmer was ever a lover of quantity. And among the transplanted rustics were several prosperous professional men, several well-gowned women, and some pretty girls who looked as though they went to dancing school, Discipline or not.