dashed open, and Brother Karkis entered.
Brother Karkis was no youthful student. He was forty-three, heavy-handed and big-footed, and his voice was the voice of a Great Dane. Born to the farm, he had been ordained a Baptist preacher, for twenty years now, and up and down through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Arkansas, he had bellowed in up-creek tabernacles.
His only formal education had been in country schools; and of all books save the Bible, revivalistic hymnals, a concordance handy for finding sermon-texts, and a manual of poultry-keeping, he was soundly ignorant. He had never met a woman of the world, never drunk a glass of wine, never heard a bar of great music, and his neck was not free from the dust of cornfields.
But it would have been a waste of pity to sigh over Brother Karkis as a plucky poor student. He had no longing for further knowledge; he was certain that he already had it all. He despised the faculty as book-adulterated wobblers in the faith — he could "out-pray and out-holler and out-save the whole lot of 'em." He desired a Mizpah degree only because it would get him a better paid job — or, as he put it, with the 1850 vocabulary which he found adequate for 1905, because it would "lead him into a wider field of usefulness."
"Say, don't you fellers ever do anything but sit around and argue and discuss and bellyache?" he shouted. "My lands, I can hear your racket way down the hall! Be a lot better for you young fellers if you'd forget your smart-aleck arguin' and spend the evening on your knees in prayer! Oh, you're a fine lot of smart educated swells, but you'll find where that rubbish gets you when you go out and have to wrestle with old Satan for unregenerate souls! What are you gasbags arguing about, anyway?"
"Harry says," wailed Eddie Fislinger, "that there's nothing in the Bible that says Christians have to have a church or preachers."
"Huh! And him that thinks he's so educated. Where's a Bible?"
It was now in the hands of Elmer, who had been reading his favorite book, "The Song of Solomon."
"Well, Brother Gantry, glad see there's one galoot here that's got sense enough to stick by the Old Book and get himself right with God, 'stead of shooting off his face like some Pedo-Baptist. Now look here, Brother Zenz: It says here in Hebrews, 'Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together.' There, I guess that'll hold you!"
"My dear brother in the Lord," said Harry, "the only thing suggested there is an assembly like the Plymouth Brotherhood, with no regular paid preachers. As I was explaining to Brother Fislinger: Personally, I'm so ardent an admirer of the Bible that I'm thinking of starting a sect where we all just sing a hymn together, then sit and read our Bibles all day long, and not have any preachers getting between us and the all-sufficient Word of God. I expect you to join, Brother Karkis, unless you're one of these dirty higher critics that want to break down the Bible."
"Oh, you make me tired," said Eddie.
"You make me tired — always twisting the plain commands of Scripture," said Brother Karkis, shutting the door — weightily, and from the outside.
"You all make me tired. My God, how you fellows can argue!" said Elmer, chewing his Pittsburgh stogie.
The room was thick now with tobacco fumes. Though in Mizpah Seminary smoking was frowned on, practically forbidden by custom, all of the consecrated company save Eddie Fislinger were at it.
He rasped, "This air is something terrible! Why you fellows touch that vile weed — Worms and men are the only animals who indulge in tobacco! I'm going to get out of here."
There was strangely little complaint.
Rid of Eddie, the others turned to their invariable topic: what they called "sex."
Frank Shallard and Don Pickens were virgins, timid and fascinated, respectful and urgent; Horace Carp had had one fumbling little greensick experience; and all three listened with nervous eagerness to the experiences of Elmer and Harry Zenz. Tonight Elmer's mind reeked with it, and he who had been almost silent during the ecclesiastical wrangling was voluble now. The youngsters panted as he chronicled his meetings with a willing choir-singer, this summer past.
"Tell me — tell me," fretted Don. "Do girls, oh — nice girls — do they really ever — uh — go with a preacher? And aren't you ashamed to face them afterwards, in church?"
"Huh!" observed Zenz, and "Ashamed? They worship you!" declared Elmer. "They stand by you the way no wife ever would — as long as they do fall for you. Why, this girl — Oh, well, she sang something elegant."
He finished vaguely, reminiscently. Suddenly he was bored at treading the mysteries of sex with these mooncalves. He lunged up.
"Going?" said Frank.
Elmer posed at the door, smirking, his hands on his hips, "Oh, no. Not a-tall." He looked at his watch. (It was a watch which reminded you of Elmer himself: large, thick, shiny, with a near-gold case.) "I merely have a date with a girl, that's all!"
He was lying, but he had been roused by his own stories, and he would have given a year of life if his boast were true. He returned to his solitary room in a fever. "God, if Juanita were only here, or Agatha, or even that little chambermaid at Solomon Junction — what the dickens was her name now?" he longed.
He sat motionless on the edge of his bed. He clenched his fists. He groaned and gripped his knees. He sprang up, to race about the room, to return and sit dolorously entranced.
"Oh, God, I can't stand it!" he moaned.
He was inconceivably lonely.
He had no friends. He had never had a friend since Jim Lefferts. Harry Zenz despised his brains, Frank Shallard despised his manners, and the rest of them he himself despised. He was bored by the droning seminary professors all day, the school-boyish arguing all evening; and in the rash of prayer-meetings and chapel-meetings and special praise-meetings he was bored by hearing the same enthusiasts gambol in the same Scriptural rejoicings.
"Oh, yes, I want to go on and preach. Couldn't go back to just business or the farm. Miss the hymns, the being boss. But — I can't do it! God, I am so lonely! If Juanita was just here!"
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