Part 6

It seemed impossible for Preachers or devout Brothers to say “virgin” as casually as they did other words; they gloated over it, toyed with it, rolled it about their tongues and tasted the full flavor of it before it slid drippingly from their lips with an amazing clarity of pronunciation. Usually they accompanied it with a doleful sigh. I thought then that the sigh was from excess of piety, and I thought that their eyes shone and their breath came a little faster from the same cause, that these things were possibly manifestations of God, and I was greatly impressed. But I am older now and I know better.

When I became old enough to understand what was meant by virginity, and to understand that it was something more than a badge of the angels, I understood also many other things that had hitherto been mysteries. I knew then what was in the mind of one of the Brothers, an extraordinarily devout man with an astounding knowledge of the wishes of God and the manners and customs of Heaven, when he stopped me on the street one day and asked me what, if anything, had happened on a recent hay ride to Blumeyer’s Ford and back by members of our social set.

“Did the boys and girls sit close together?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. We had to. We were on a hay wagon.”

“Did you boys sit right up against them?”

I told him we did, and in my youthful innocence I remarked that I had been compelled to sit so close to one girl that we could hardly tell our legs apart. The old man drew a sharp breath, sighed and his eyes glistened. He repeated the word “legs” with gusto, he gloated over it, and then he said:

“You sat so close to her that your legs touched? Your leg touched hers? Your leg was right up against her?”

“Yes, sir. I had to.”

“The leg of a young virgin!” mused the old devil. “That was wicked. It is wicked to think of the legs of a virgin. God will punish you.”

He went away muttering to himself. I was disgusted, not at his ideas, because I had practically the same thought about virgins that he did, and so did most of the other boys of the town, but at his manner. Here was an old man who had set himself up as a mundane representative of the Lord, who told me whom to worship and how to worship Him, who held daily communion with God and received messages from Him touching on my conduct, gloating and trembling because a boy had sat with his leg against the leg of a girl in the forced confinement of a hay ride. God knows what is happening to him if he is alive in these days of short skirts and silk stockings.

Another of our Brothers, a very prominent member of one of our Protestant churches, kept a store in the business district not far from the Court House. He was waiting on a customer the day that the first woman to ride astride in our town cantered down Columbia Street, and his performance was a town scandal for many years. He caught a glimpse of the girl through the window, and he abandoned his customer and rushed to the street, in company with half the county officials who had been dozing with their feet on their desks, and all of the town loafers. The Brother followed her for several blocks, missing no detail of her costume, which was rather bizarre and daring for those days, and then he went back to his store and his customer.

He stood for a while wrapped in contemplation.

“She was riding like a man!” he said. “Her legs--her legs----”

My experiences in these matters, of course, were principally with Preachers and Brothers, but I had occasional contacts with the Sisters. They, too, described God and Heaven, but they did not conceive God as being quite so old and feeble as the Being worshipped by the Brothers, and for the most part they populated Heaven with handsome, stalwart young men, presumably virgins. I recall one exceedingly devout Sister who expressed the belief that there were no female angels in Heaven, and I have heard her praying with extraordinary fervor to God, in effect, to make an exception in her case. Whether she was justified in this optimistic opinion of herself I never knew, but I assume that she and the other Sisters, in their discussion of the virginity of angels, experienced the same sort of vicarious pleasure that seemed to mean so much to the Preachers and the Brothers.

7

I did not go to many camp meetings; ours was not a camp-meeting country. We went in more for protracted meetings, and for the stirring revivals of professional evangelists, held in comfortable church buildings. Usually I went to camp meeting only because some girl in whom I was interested had to go. But they were very popular with a certain type of young man about Farmington, who knew that religious emotion is very akin to secular emotion; the line of demarcation is very thin, and most men who have been around religious women very much know that one emotion can quickly be transformed into the other. Young girls are much easier prey after they have been overwhelmed by religion, their nerves upset and their brains whirling with emotion, and they are then easily persuaded that the Lord will forgive, even though His earthly agents will not. Of course such a statement could not be proven, but it is quite likely that more seductions have occurred at camp meetings, and _en route_ to and from them, than on all the front porches and lawn swings that were ever manufactured, although in Farmington for many years a lawn swing was regarded as a lure of Hell. Even while the service was in progress the buggies around the meeting tent were filled with men and women petting, or, as we called it then, spooning.

Strange things happened at these camp meetings, and at the other gatherings as well, when a forthright religionist saw the light. At one such holy conclave an old woman, for many years a thorn in the flesh of the godly, suddenly bounced to her feet and shouted:

“Praise the Lord! My corn hurts! Praise the Lord!”

And this, because it embodied physical suffering and a great deal of mental torture as well, was accepted as an infallible sign that God had at last entered her soul. She had been converted, and all the rest of her life she was a prying, sanctimonious old pest. She used to stop me on the street and inquire as to the condition of my soul, and ask me whether I said my prayers at night, and whether I read the Bible, and she would grab me by the arm and pinch me and demand the Golden Text of the last Sunday-school lesson. And if by any chance I had forgotten or did not know, she scolded me and predicted dire things for me in the life to come. Incidentally, she knew all about the life to come; it seems that God had appeared to her in a vision, and had described Heaven to her.

At all of these meetings extraordinary efforts were made to ensnare the children and convert them to Christianity; the workers for the Lord were not at all concerned with the fact that the children did not know what it was all about, that they had no opportunity to choose their own religion, and with the further and obvious fact that they succumbed to nothing but fright and a great surge of emotion. That method persists. The Church still obtains its converts by noise and appeals to primitive emotion, and by threats, rather than by intelligently implanting a true and deep-seated conception of God and the heavenly wonders. But to the religionists a convert is a convert, no matter how obtained; I have known boys to be thrashed because they would not profess religion.

As with the Catholic Church, the unspoken and always denied slogan of the Methodists and of the other Protestant sects is “Catch ’em while they’re young,” but unlike the Catholics the Protestants cannot hold them. For one thing, they do not put on a good enough show; they do not understand lighting, and they have no uniforms and no Latin chanters. A Catholic priest covered by a surplice or what not, and his voice rising and falling sonorously in the chanting of a bit of Latin, is a very impressive spectacle, and his appearance lends dignity to his words. The gentle stare that most of them wear is also effective. As soon as an embryo Methodist becomes intelligent enough to visualize the sort of Heaven that the Brothers are preparing for him, he shudders and forthwith goes to the Devil, while the Catholics fill their converts with such fear of God and the Pope, or the Pope and God, to put them in the order of their importance, that very few get away. A renegade Catholic is almost as rare as a Methodist Preacher who does not think he is sprouting wings, and that his voice is truly the Voice of God.

A BAD BOY COMES TO JESUS

1

It is clear, then, that not only was my ancestral background religious, but that I lived in an atmosphere heavy with religious feeling. Religion and the Church dominated the whole of my early life. Among all of my relatives I do not recall one whose home was not oppressed, and whose life was not made miserable and fretful, by the terrible fear of a relentless God whose principal occupation seemed to be snooping about searching for someone to punish. Religion was poured down my throat in doses that strangled me and made me sick of soul. There was simply too much of it. God was fed to me morning, noon and night, and He did not taste good; I was hounded from pillar to post by a pack of baying, sanctimonious hypocrites beseeching me to get right with Jesus, and to read and believe that collection of Hebrew fairy tales called the Bible.

I came finally to think of God as I did of castor oil, and the flavor that He left in my mouth was just as frightful. He and His religion were personified by the dour-faced men and women who went sliding about the town; rubbing their hands together, scraping the skin from their souls but not from their palms. They were irritatingly gentle, and they sighed soulfully and mouthed platitudes with enormous gusto; they called each other Brother and Sister and poked their messy, prying fingers into every bit of fun that anybody tried to have; they fed their little shriveled souls with scandal and smeared dirt over everything that was amusing. They regarded all young men as professional seducers, and for the greater glory of God ruined the reputations of young girls who went buggy-riding and seemed to enjoy it--and nothing can be so completely and irrevocably ruined as the reputation of a young girl in a small town.

But despite the feelings of disgust and revolt which the labors of these servants of the Lord evoked in me, I did not definitely align myself on the side of the non-believers and the sinners until after I had been “converted.” I began on that night to hate the Church and its religion, and all of its prying, messy hypocrisy and sanctimony. And especially I hated the preachers and the Brothers and Sisters. I still do; they give me a pain in the neck. I felt that I had been betrayed; I knew that the spirit of God was not working in me, but I was told that it was and dared to deny it. I was told that I must “get right with the Lord,” whatever that may be. I felt that the Brothers and Sisters and the evangelist had taken an unfair advantage of my emotions; there was a band at the revival, and under the influence of music I will do anything. It compelled me to do something that I did not want to do; it humiliated me in my own eyes, and nothing that has ever happened to me since has made me so miserable and ashamed.

I had reached the ripe old age of fourteen or fifteen when the hand of the Lord, operating through the agency of Brother McConnell and a horde of wailing Brothers and Sisters with religious fervor breaking out upon them like boils, reached out and plucked me from the burning. But it was not their fault that I had not been converted earlier; they had tried often enough. One of my earliest recollections is of a Preacher asking me why I did not profess religion and join the Church, and why I had not given my heart to God, as he called it. I was occasionally singled out at protracted meetings and at revivals and made the object of special prayers, but until Brother McConnell came with his improved technique and circus methods I had always held out.

2

My own church, of course, was the Southern Methodist, but the revival meeting at which I was converted was a union gathering in the Northern Methodist edifice, which was about a block from Braun’s saloon and an even shorter distance from the county jail. We called it the Rock church because it was constructed largely of granite blocks. Its members were considered good enough people in their way, but they were hardly among the socially elect, for many of them lived south of the Post Office among the Catholics and the Lutherans, and in some circles it was suspected that they held, at times, intercourse with the Devil. Nevertheless, they were Methodists and Christians and first-class politicians, and by this time they have probably assumed control of the town.

All of the Protestant congregations of Farmington chipped in to pay the $600 demanded by Brother McConnell for his week’s work for the Lord. This was a goodly fee, but it was not considered exorbitant, as Brother McConnell was a professional devil-chaser with a national reputation, and it was felt that he, if anyone, could put Farmington on the right side of the heavenly ledger. There was considerable rivalry among our good people as to who should entertain the evangelist and pay for his fried chicken and other delicacies, and I do not recall who finally drew the plum. But the family whose bed and board he graced was considered very fortunate; it had practically assured itself of ultimate salvation, since the emissaries of the Devil would not dare to invade such a sanctuary of God.

Brother McConnell was an extraordinarily agile man. Throughout his service, and particularly after the collection had been taken up and found to be good, he bounded back and forth about the pulpit, chasing the Devil hither and yon, shaking his hair from his eyes, sweating at every pore and roaring charges about dens of evil that I, for one, was never able to find in Farmington, although I headed several exploring parties. He dealt largely in that sort of goods; to him, and to most of the other preachers that I recall, morality and goodness were nothing but chastity, and they never let an opportunity pass to insinuate that the finest men in our town whiled away their idle hours with scarlet women. Their insinuations, of course, had no basis in fact; to my knowledge there was but one professional scarlet woman in town, and there simply was not time. However, there were, to be sure, amateurs.

The church was crowded on the night I was told that Jesus had taken possession of my soul. I sat about the middle of the center section with my elder brother, a phlegmatic boy who was also converted but who would never talk much about it, while across the aisle were my sister and my younger brother. Every few moments the evangelist would stop shouting and sink back into his chair, gasping, wiping his brow and breaking into sobs as he bowed his head in a prayer that came in a throaty mumble from his lips. Here and there throughout the house was an echoing gasp and a strangled sob, utterances of tortured and frightened souls about to be swirled into a great wave of religious frenzy. And standing in the aisle and about the pulpit were Brothers and Sisters, experienced revival workers, eager retrievers for the Lord, their faces flushed with emotion and their eagle eyes roving the congregation in quest of just such persons.

The instant the evangelist sat down, his band leader popped up like a trained seal, and from the band and the augmented choir poured the lilting measures of a hymn.

Oh, that will be Glory for me! Glory for me, Yes, glory for me! When by His grace I shall look on His face, That will be glory, Yes, glory for me!

The first hymn was usually something of this sort, a tune with a swing to it, to get the congregation swaying in rhythm, and to attract the uncertain sinners lounging about the door and looking in, unable to decide whether or not to enter. Usually they came in after hearing “Glory” and a song or two like “Bringing in the Sheaves” and “Jesus, Lover of My Soul.” Later the choir swung into the doleful songs like “Rock of Ages” and “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” The emotional appeal was terrific; after the first hymn or two the audience joined, bellowing the words with fanatical fervor. Murmurs began to arise as the evangelist alternately talked and prayed, and then suddenly the music stopped, the preacher shut off his talk and for an instant there was a silence. It was theatrical hokum, but effective as always. Then Brother McConnell leaped and lunged to the front of the pulpit, his eyes glaring and his hair streaming down before his eyes. He flung his arms wide.

“Come to Jesus!” he shouted. “Brothers! Sisters! Come to Jesus!”

He stood there trembling, imploring the sinners to abandon their hellish lives, and the choir boomed into song:

Lives there a friend like the lowly Jesus? No, not one! No, not one!

All over the church now there were cries of ecstatic agony as the victims writhed in emotional torture, and after a little while people began jumping to their feet and shouting:

“Glory! Glory to God! Hallelujah!”

The noise was deafening. People were shouting in every part of the audience, they were weeping and moaning. One old woman jumped to her feet, climbed onto her seat and began to yell:

“I see Jesus! I see Jesus! I see Jesus!”

She repeated it over and over again, “I see Jesus!” and finally she collapsed into her seat, mumbling and weeping. The evangelist took up the cry. He roared back and forth across the pulpit, shaking his hands above his head, calling on God to damn the sinners. His whole body quivered and he screamed at the top of his voice:

“Jesus is in this house! Come to Jesus! Give your heart to God!”

And above the roar of his voice and the rumble of the seething congregation rose the music. It ebbed and flowed, it beat against the rafters and rebounded from the floor, always that regular beat of a hymn, like tom-toms in the jungles of Hayti. Many of the choir members sang hysterically, their voices rising on the high notes into veritable shrieks, but there was no change in the steady thunder of the organ or the wail of the violin, and there was no escaping the emotional effect of the song:

“Bringing in the sheaves, Bringing in the sheaves, We shall come rejoicing, Bringing in the sheaves.”

Then there was testimony. Old skinflints who had devoted their lives to cheating their neighbors, old women whose gossiping and backbiting were the talk of the town, hopped into the aisles and told how, at some previous meeting, God had entered their hearts and made them pure and holy. Their voices rose to shrieks; they grew red in the face from the fervor of their shouts, and one old man who had only that day cheated half a dozen men in a real-estate deal stood in the aisle with his hands raised toward Heaven and wept bitterly over the sins of the world. Tears streamed down their faces, and many who had only a few hours before dumped sand in the sugar groaned loudly in sympathetic torment, and shouted “Amen, Brother! Amen!”

By this time Brother McConnell’s collar hung limp about his neck, but his passion for the Lord was unchecked. He stopped the testimony when it appeared that everybody in the church wanted to say something; there was another hymn and he began calling for converts. He shouted that we were all wicked sinners and must come to Jesus.

“All who want to go to Heaven stand up!”

Naturally, everybody stood up. He told them to sit down; they obeyed, for he held them in the hollow of his hand.

“All Christians stand up!”

Everybody stood up except my sister, and as I think things over after the lapse of years I know that was what first caused me to suspect that she was, and is, a remarkably intelligent woman. She said afterward that she resented Brother McConnell’s holier-than-thou attitude, and thought he was an old windbag. She could not swallow his repeated assertion that he was a representative of God, and that the Lord had sent him to gather Farmington into the fold. She had, better than anyone else there, control over her emotions; she could not be stampeded. But for several years thereafter she was the target of a great deal of missionary zeal; even the Catholics tried their hands with her after it had become obvious that she would not subscribe to the beliefs of the Methodists, but all of it was unsuccessful. They could not feaze her even when they pointed her out as “that Asbury girl who wouldn’t say she was a Christian.”

Half the men and women in the church were sobbing while the band played, the choir sang its dismal tunes and Brother McConnell swayed back and forth in the pulpit and pleaded with them to get right with God and confess their sins.

“Oh, Brothers, come to Jesus!” he cried. “Let God enter your heart this night! Give your heart to Jesus!”

At the beginning of the moaning and groaning the Brothers and Sisters who were to act as procurers for the Lord scattered over the church, and as the services went on they picked out the ones who seemed to be most upset emotionally and therefore ripest for glory. They hung over these poor creatures, sniveling down their necks, exulting in their misery, exhorting them to march down the aisle and see God. These Brothers and Sisters, of course, had been converted many years before and were O.K. with the Lord.

“Oh, Brother!” they pleaded. “Come to glory! Give your heart to Jesus! Jesus died that you might be saved! He died on the cross for you! Brother, come to Jesus!”

And so on _ad nauseam_, with their continual repetition of Jesus and glory, glory and Jesus. There was no attempt at sensible argument, no effort to show the prospective converts that the Christian religion was better than the Mohammedan religion or the religion of Zoroaster; there was nothing but a continual hammering at emotional weaknesses. And finally the bewildered brains of the victims sagged under the strain and they stumbled into the aisles and were hauled and shoved and pushed down to the mourners’ bench, and presumably into the presence of God as embodied in His earthly representative, Brother Lincoln McConnell.

3

I was fair game for them. There was hardly anybody in the church who did not know how emotional and how excitable I was, and how music affected me. Why, I used to be thrilled over the way I myself played the violin, and have been known to hang entranced over a tune of my own composition! Even before the services began I saw that many of the Brothers and Sisters had spotted me and were only waiting the proper moment to pounce upon me, and when the call for converts came as many of them as could get near me pleaded and begged and cajoled; they scrambled and almost fought in their eagerness to ensnare such a prime morsel for the Lord. They could have worked no more furiously if God had been keeping the score. They screeched at me that now was the time to see Jesus, that God was waiting impatiently for me to be converted.

Some of them even threatened. They painted horrible pictures of Hell; they told me that unless I went down the aisle and confessed my sins and asked God to forgive me I would sizzle and burn and scorch forevermore. One old woman, her face working with fanatical fury, screamed at me that I was holding up the salvation of my whole family; that my father and my mother and my sisters and brothers would not go to Heaven unless I professed religion; she shouted that Satan was waiting outside the church to lead me into the depths of Hell and light a fire under my immortal soul. The whole crew pushed and tugged and hauled at me; one Brother got hold of my arm and tried to drag me into the aisle, yelling “Come to Jesus! Jesus is calling for you!”