“You bet—providing you encourage ’em to keep their bodies in swell shape, too,” condescended Wallace Umstead. “Well, I don’t want to talk as a prof—after all I’m glad I can still remain just one of the Boys—but you aren’t going to develop any very big horse-power in your praying tomorrow morning if you don’t get your sleep. And me to my little downy! G’night!”
At the closing of the door, Harry Zenz, the seminary iconoclast, yawned, “Wallace is probably the finest slice of tripe in my wide clerical experience. Thank God, he’s gone! Now we can be natural and talk dirty!”
“And yet,” complained Frank Shallard, “you encourage him to stay and talk about his pet methods of exercise! Don’t you ever tell the truth, Harry?”
“Never carelessly. Why, you idiot, I want Wallace to run and let the dean know what an earnest worker in the vineyard I am. Frank, you’re a poor innocent. I suspect you actually believe some of the dope they teach us here. And yet you’re a man of some reading. You’re the only person in Mizpah except myself who could appreciate a paragraph of Huxley. Lord, how I pity you when you get into the ministry! Of course, Fislinger here is a grocery clerk, Elmer is a ward politician, Horace is a dancing master—”
He was drowned beneath a surf of protests, not too jocose and friendly.
Harry Zenz was older than the others—thirty-two at least. He was plump, almost completely bald, and fond of sitting still; and he could look profoundly stupid. He was a man of ill-assorted but astonishing knowledge; and in the church ten miles from Mizpah which he had regularly supplied for two years he was considered a man of humorless learning and bloodless piety. He was a complete and cheerful atheist, but he admitted it only to Elmer Gantry and Horace Carp. Elmer regarded him as a sort of Jim Lefferts, but he was as different from Jim as pork fat from a crystal. He hid his giggling atheism—Jim flourished his; he despised women—Jim had a disillusioned pity for the Juanita Klauzels of the world; he had an intellect—Jim had only cynical guesses.
Zenz interrupted their protests:
“So you’re a bunch of Erasmuses! You ought to know. And there’s no hypocrisy in what we teach and preach! We’re a specially selected group of Parsifals—beautiful to the eye and stirring to the ear and overflowing with knowledge of what God said to the Holy Ghost in camera at 9:16 last Wednesday morning. We’re all just rarin’ to go out and preach the precious Baptist doctrine of ‘Get ducked or duck.’ We’re wonders. We admit it. And people actually sit and listen to us, and don’t choke! I suppose they’re overwhelmed by our nerve! And we have to have nerve, or we’d never dare to stand in a pulpit again. We’d quit, and pray God to forgive us for having stood up there and pretended that we represent God, and that we can explain what we ourselves say are the unexplainable mysteries! But I still claim that there are preachers who haven’t our holiness. Why is it that the clergy are so given to sex crimes?”
“That’s not true!” from Eddie Fislinger.
“Don’t talk that way!” Don Pickens begged. Don was Frank’s roommate: a slight youth, so gentle, so affectionate, that even that raging lion of righteousness, Dean Trosper, was moved to spare him.