Chapter IV: Part 4

I went to the preacher’s house the next day so Brother Jenkins could sprinkle holy water upon my head and mumble a prayer, and later, having thus been baptized, I joined the church, but I joined with my tongue in my cheek and a sneer in my heart. I have never seen anything in any church since that would impel me to remove either my tongue or the sneer. And when I admitted publicly that I had been converted and was now a good and faithful servant of the Methodist God, I said to myself: “Over the left.” That was our way of saying: “I am like hell!”

NOTES ON A SAINTED RELATIVE

1

I went downtown the next morning after I had become a certified one hundred per cent. convert, and was met by swarms of Brothers and Sisters who overwhelmed me with congratulations, and regaled me with tales of their own experiences when they saw God, and of the temptations that the Devil would now prepare for me. It seemed that I was not yet safe; I had, so far as they knew, accepted God and was one of His chosen children, although not a Jew, but He would still permit Satan to have his way with me upon occasion. I was instructed to walk humbly and with downcast eyes, not daring to look up lest I be led into sin. The Brothers, gloating the while, seemed especially anxious that the handsome young virgins of the town should not induce me to tread the scarlet paths of wickedness; the Sisters were more concerned with the Drink Demon, and the evils of playing cards and dancing. One Sister stopped me in front of Morris Brothers’ store and, beating time with her hand, lifted her voice in song:

“Yield not to temptation,
For yielding is sin.”

And so on.

Nearly all of them seemed to be obsessed by the conviction that at last I had done something to justify my ancestry; that Bishop Asbury had looked down from the Heavenly Mansions upon Brother McConnell’s revival meeting and had approved the manner in which my conversion had been brought about.

“The Bishop is proud of you to-day, Herbie,” said one devout Brother who sold shoddy clothing at high prices. “Last night was a great night for God and the Bishop.”

I did not ask him how he knew that Bishop Asbury was proud of me, nor did I inquire into the source of his information that the conversion, by force, of a fourteen-year-old boy was a great thing for God. I merely said: “Yes, sir,” and went my way. But it went on day after day; everybody in town, it seemed, had a word to say about the pride that now swelled the heart of the Bishop as he went about among the virgins of Heaven and lolled on a cloud strumming his golden harp and producing platinum and diamond music. I got very tired of it, and finally, to one old Sister who had apparently thought of nothing else for a week, I said:

“Oh, to hell with the Bishop!”

What blasphemy! She gasped and hurried away, and long before I reached home she had telephoned and told my mother that I had blasphemed and cried out against God. Naturally, my mother was worried; she thought from the tale told to her that I had gone up and down the streets of the town shouting defiance of God and yelling open praise of the Devil and all his works. But I told her the whole story, and she listened without comment, and when I had finished all she said was this:

“Well, don’t say ‘hell’ to them.”

I think that was the last I ever heard from my mother about religion, and from my father I heard even less. Once my mother asked me to read the Bible, and although of course I had already done so, I read it again. I read it twice, from the first absurdity of Genesis to the final fairy tale of Revelation. But I found nothing in it that caused me to believe that it was an inspired work, and nothing that proved, to me, the correctness of the pretensions so freely made by the Sisters and Brothers and the Preachers that they, and they alone, were the representatives and accredited agents of Jesus Christ on earth. And the sermons that I heard thereafter--the Preachers selected single verses from the Bible and constructed elaborate harangues around them--struck me more forcibly than ever as the trashiest sort of poppycock and balderdash. I was no longer afraid of the Hell that they pictured with such avidity, and I no longer thrilled to their tales of the magnificence of Heaven, although of course to a growing boy the presence of so many virgin angels, all apparently willing and available, was interesting. But none of them preached the religion of Christ; they preached hatred and revenge. They held out slight hope of reward; instead they were prophets of torture, promising eternal punishment for petty crimes.

2

It was about this time, also, that I began to investigate the glories of Bishop Asbury, and to make such inquiries as I could into his saintly virtues. We had in our library the Bishop’s Journals in three volumes, and we had also two or three volumes of biography, all of which I read. In later years I have read many others. Probably twenty or thirty books, in one form or another, have been written about Bishop Asbury, and I think that I have gone pretty thoroughly into most of them. But most of them are senseless if not downright idiotic; they were written by preachers and published by the Methodist Church, and the whole slant is religious. They are based on the assumption that a Preacher and a Bishop must of necessity be a holy man, and that all the little idiosyncrasies and faults that give a clue to the real character of the man, are but manifestations of the fight between God and Satan.

From an ecclesiastical point of view there can be no question of Bishop Asbury’s greatness, for there have been few men who have left a more definite imprint on American religious culture. There were fewer than 500 Methodists in America when he came here in 1771; when he died there were 214,000, with good churches and great influence. He had completed the church organization according to his own ideas, ignoring to a large extent the plans of John Wesley as set forth by Thomas Rankin and Thomas Coke, and he had assumed as much power as a Pope of Rome. As a religious organizer he has had few equals, and it is a great pity that he did so much unnecessary organizing, and that his amazing genius should have flowered in such a futile and preposterous creation as the present-day Methodist Church; a great pity that he could not have developed a more flexible creed, one that would have grown as the world grew, instead of standing stock-still and viewing the universe with intolerant suspicion, with constant bickerings about the wishes of God and yelping appeals to the Almighty to damn somebody.

But statistically Bishop Asbury is even greater. He preached his first sermon in America at Philadelphia on the day he set foot on this continent, in October, 1771, and delivered his final pronouncement against sin on his deathbed, when, propped upon his pillows, he expounded the twenty-first chapter of Revelation. In these forty-five years he preached some 17,000 sermons, and probably 20,000 in his whole life, for he began preaching when he was about fifteen or sixteen, some three years after his conversion. The number of words that he uttered for the Lord is simply incalculable; there is no telling how far they would reach if they could be laid end to end.

In their methods of preaching and in their intolerance the preachers of my boyhood, of other sects as well as Methodists, were devout and faithful followers of Bishop Asbury. The bellowing evangelist of the Billy Sunday and Lincoln McConnell type is his lineal ecclesiastical descendant. He preached always at the top of his voice, for he had great faith in exhortation, and to him the good sermon was the noisy sermon; even to-day the Preacher who rants and raves is the one who is regarded by his flock as nearest to God. When Bishop Asbury was not preaching he was praying; he rose every morning at four o’clock and prayed and read the Bible until six, when he breakfasted and set forth on his travels. He would not sleep more than six hours a night because Wesley had decided that six hours was enough. One day a week he fasted, and part of another day, punishing his flesh for the greater glory of the Lord.

This love of self-inflicted punishment affected his whole life. As a boy he was moody and sensitive; he appears to have been of the type that complains constantly that he is being “picked on.” He was introspective, finding his greatest joy in self-pity, and he was never happy, as we used to say in Missouri, unless he was miserable. His playmates in the little English school near Birmingham called him “parson” because of his pious lugubriousness, and when the teacher beat him or something happened to cross him he sought solace in prayer.

References to his numerous physical ailments begin to appear in Bishop Asbury’s Journals about 1772, when he was in his late twenties. He had never been strong physically, and never after he came to America was he in good health. He was apparently a hypochondriac, with all the hypochondriac’s morbid delight in recounting his symptoms; many pages of his Journals are filled with them. He took enormous doses of medicine, performed slight surgical operations upon himself, and raised great blisters on the slightest provocation, frequently blistering his whole body from throat to abdomen. Once he preached a whole afternoon with so many blisters that he was not able either to stand or sit, for he had blistered not only the soles of his feet but less refined portions of his anatomy also; he had to be propped up in the pulpit, where he raved and ranted for hour after hour, saving many sinners. He took no care of himself whatever, riding horseback through snowstorms and rainstorms with biting pains in his chest, and with his stomach and throat filled with ulcers, feverish from pain and religion.

All of these things he notes in his Journals with great gusto, and gives long lists of the medicines he took and the measures he employed to combat his sickness. Tartar emetic was his favorite remedy, and of this he swallowed enormous quantities. For an ulcerated throat he used a gargle of “sage tea, honey, vinegar and mustard, and after that another gargle of sage, tea, alum, rose leaves and loaf sugar to strengthen the parts.” Another favorite remedy was a diet, as he called it, made from this remarkable formula: “one quart of hard cider, one hundred nails, a handful of snake root, a handful of pennell seed, a handful of wormwood.” He boiled this concoction from a quart to a pint, and drank a wineglass of it each morning before breakfast for ten days, meanwhile using no butter, milk or meat. He notes in his Journal that “it will make the stomach very sick.” It will. I brewed the drink once, and I had as soon drink dynamite; bootleg gin is nectar by comparison.

There can be little doubt that Bishop Asbury’s physical condition had a great deal to do with his extraordinary piety, for it is true that most of the religious leaders have had many things wrong with their bodies, and that the sicker a man is, the more religious he is likely to be. A man who is healthy and normal mentally and physically seldom becomes fanatically religious. True, healthy men sometimes become monks and preachers, but except in rare instances such men are comparatively moderate in their views. And generally they do themselves very well in a material way, especially if they become monks.

It was once my journalistic duty to make a daily visit to a Franciscan monastery in Quincy, Illinois, and the good brothers remain a high light in a somewhat drab period. Jovial and pot-bellied, they were veritable Friar Tucks in brown bathrobes, extraordinarily hearty eaters and drinkers, and not even at pre-Volstead banquets have I ever received as much free food and drink as from the good Franciscans. It was easy to see why such men as these went in for religion, but it is not so easy to understand the motive of the Protestant minister. The earthly rewards are nothing to speak of, and what with evolution and one thing and another, he can no longer be certain that there is a Heaven to go to.

The Franciscans were fascinating spectacles as they padded on their sandaled feet through the gardens of the monastery and along the graveled paths that led to the church next door. I became particularly fond of Brother John--I think they called him Brother John, anyhow I did--who might have stepped from the pages of Boccaccio. He was the press representative of the monastery; he always answered my ring, and through the bars of the door I could see him, waddling genially down the corridor, puffing and rattling his keys. It always seemed to me that Brother John was miscast; doubtless he lived a happy and carefree life, though perhaps overly cluttered with prayer, but I thought it a great pity that he could not have been an alderman. And what a bartender he would have made! His paunch would have elected him a City Father, and his fund of stories would have got him a job in any first-class barroom. But possibly he has reformed and is now leading some such useful life.

Brother John made but one effort to convert me and induce me to join the Catholic Church, and when I said “Bunk!” he stopped immediately and said that inasmuch as I would undoubtedly go to Hell he would still take advantage of my reportorial capacity to get a little publicity for the Church before that unfortunate event occurred. But there was no tolerance in the attitude of my reverend relative, the Bishop. His outstanding characteristic was intolerance; it shows in a hundred different acts of his career; he was arbitrary and domineering. Anyone who was well dressed or who bore any outward signs of prosperity was offensive in his sight; he preached the gospel of poverty and self-denial, and believed that all pleasure was wicked and that self-inflicted suffering was heavenly bliss. He was imperious and scornful of restraint and opposition; what he said was true he thought was true, and that was all there was to it. When men differed with him they were wrong, and he had no disposition to reopen any question which he had once settled in his mind. He believed that he was appointed by God to rule the Methodists in America, and that he was a legitimate successor of the Apostles. In 1801 he wrote:

“I will tell the world what I rest my authority on; first, divine authority; second, seniority in America; third, the election of the General Conference; fourth, my ordination by Thomas Coke, Philip William Otterbein, Richard Whatcoat and Thomas Vasey; fifth, because the signs of an Apostle have been seen in me.”

Divine authority and the signs of an Apostle!

Yet his steadfast belief that he was so appointed was one of the secrets of his power and influence, which were greater than that of any other churchman of his time. We are even yet feeling their effects, and we shall continue to feel them. There seems to be no hope, what with Boards of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals and similar intolerant activities, that the Methodist Church will ever become more worthy of respect than it was in his day. Indeed, it grows worse and worse.

Another prime factor in Bishop Asbury’s extraordinary piety, as can be seen by the entries in his Journals and by a study of the biographies written by other clergymen, was his terrific mental turmoil. Throughout his whole life his mind whirled like a pinwheel; he was constantly in what, back in Missouri, we used to call a “terrible state.” About the time he began to be ill he started referring to himself as “Poor Francis,” and thereafter that was the dominant note of his life. He pitied himself because of his physical ills, and then dosed himself with horrid medicines, and with bleedings and blisterings, making his ailments more painful and himself an object of greater pity. He tortured himself thus physically, and flogged his mind with constant thoughts of his unworthiness; he was continually groveling before God, beseeching the Almighty to put temptation in his path. These extracts taken at random from his Journals show the trend of his thought:

“I do not sufficiently love God nor live by faith.

“I must lament that I am not perfectly crucified with God.

“I feel some conviction for sleeping too long.

“My heart is grieved and groaneth for want of more holiness.

“Unguarded and trivial conversation has brought a degree of spiritual deadness.

“My conscience reproves me for the appearance of levity.

“A cloud rested on my mind, which was occasioned by talking and jesting. I also feel at times tempted to impatience and pride of heart.

“My heart is still depressed for want of more religion.

“Were I to stand on my own merit, where should I go but to hell?

“Here I received a bitter pill from one of my greatest friends [referring to his last letter from John Wesley]. Praise the Lord for my trials also! May they be sanctified.”

Bishop Asbury preached the same doctrine of personal conversion and sanctification that is preached by present-day Methodist ministers, and he sought this blissful state for himself with frenzied zealousness. At times he thought he had entered into what he called the full fruition of a life with God; at other times he fancied himself given up to Satan. The older he grew, the gloomier and more introspective he became, and like most of the other great religionists he had a pronounced streak of melancholia. He had alternating periods of exaltation and depression; he was either soaring the heights of religious ecstasy or floundering in the depths of sin and despair. He did not seem able to find any middle ground in which he could obtain a measure of peace and contentment; occasionally in his Journals he noted that he was happy in God and at peace, but the next entry showed him groaning in great vexation of spirit, crying out a doubt of the value of his religious life. He yearned for a constant religious thrill, and mourned because he could not satisfy his yearning.

DIVERSIONS OF AN ABANDONED SINNER

1

Almost immediately after my conversion, or at least as soon as it had become noised about that I had consigned my holy relative to what some of our more finicky Sisters, unable to bring themselves to say “Hell,” referred to coyly as “the bad place,” I abandoned myself to a life of sin and became a total spiritual loss in the eyes of all Farmington except members of my immediate family and certain of my intimate friends who collaborated with me in various wicked but pleasant enterprises. That is to say, I cast aside the taboos and the inhibitions that religion had thrown about me, and became for the first time in my life a normal boy. I existed simply to play and raise hell generally, and for some curious reason the activity which gave me the most pleasure was throwing rocks at the church or in some manner interrupting the service.

It was not long before even the most hopeful had ceased their talk of sending me to a theological school and fitting me to carry on the family labors, for I began to smoke cigarettes, play cards, swear, drink when I could find a bartender willing to ignore the law forbidding the sale of liquor to a minor, and to cock an appreciative and appraising eye at the girls. It was then agreed that it was too late to do anything with me or for me, and on the Sunday morning that I mounted my new bicycle and rode brazenly past the Southern Methodist church as the Brothers and Sisters filed with bowed heads into the edifice for worship, I was consigned body and soul to the sizzling pits of Hell.

I suffered a great deal of physical agony before I learned to smoke cigarettes, and it was some time before I learned to blow smoke through my nose with the nonchalant ease affected by the group of older boys and young men who loafed in Doss’s barber shop and around the Post Office Building and McKinney’s peanut and popcorn machine. My older brother had learned a year or so before, and he frequently made himself very offensive to me by boasting that he could smoke a whole package of Sweet Caporals or Drums without becoming ill. I yearned to try, but he would not give me a cigarette, and neither would any of the other boys, and my finances were in such shape that I could not purchase any. And, of course, such wicked things could not be purchased and charged to my father; I could have charged a plug of chewing tobacco to him, but not cigarettes.

But one day I was loafing hopefully in McKinney’s when my brother came in and produced a dime that he had amassed by laborious work chopping wood at home, and bought a package of Sweet Caporal Little Cigars. These were really nothing but cigarettes wrapped with tobacco instead of paper, but they resembled a cigar and were thought to be infinitely more stylish and manly than the ordinary cigarette. I asked him for one, and he said he would not give one to John the Baptist himself. But I persisted, and followed him home, aghast at his determination to hide behind the barn and smoke the whole package one after the other.

“I’ll light one from the end of the other,” he boasted.

Finally as we came opposite Brother Nixon’s house just south of Elmwood Seminary, he relented and very carefully opened the box and handed me a Little Cigar. It was a great moment. The yard of Elmwood Seminary fairly swarmed with girl students, including the young lady who at the time represented everything that was desirable in the female sex, and I visioned their cries of startled admiration as I passed, puffing nonchalantly, blowing smoke from my nose and perhaps from my ears.

I had no doubt of my ability to handle the innocent-looking Little Cigar; indeed, at that time I considered no problem insurmountable. My brother instructed me to fill my mouth with smoke and then take a long, deep breath, and after that blow the smoke out gently and slowly, holding the Little Cigar between the first and second finger and crooking the little finger as we did when we drank tea or coffee, that being a mark of gentility and refinement. As we came in front of the old Clardy homestead less than half a block from the Seminary I struck a match and applied it to the end of the Little Cigar, while my brother watched anxiously and from time to time gave me advice. I puffed as he directed.

“Got a mouthful?” he asked.

Unable to speak, my cheeks bulging, I nodded.

“Now take a long breath.”

But, alas, I did not breathe; I swallowed, and while the smoke penetrated me and spread throughout my interior, it did not take the correct route. I began to strangle, and my brother got excited.

“Blow it out, you damn fool!” he cried. “You’ll choke!”

I did choke. I did even worse; I became very ill, and the spectacle which so intrigued the young ladies of the Seminary that day was not that of a young gentleman going nonchalantly to Hell by the cigarette route. Instead, they saw a very sick boy rolling on the sidewalk trying desperately to stem a distressing internal upheaval.

It was several days later before I had enough courage to try again, and I debated within myself whether or not God had caused me to be so ill in order to show me that smoking was a sin. But I had definitely committed myself to the Devil, so a few days later I begged a dime from my father and bought a package of Drums and another of Sweet Caporals, the two most popular brands of cigarettes. With these, and a supply of matches, I went behind the barn. I made a neat pile of sawdust to lie upon, and there I remained the whole afternoon, smoking one cigarette after another. I was terribly ill at first, but gradually improved until the last three or four gave me no trouble. I did not have much appetite for dinner that night, but I had conquered the cigarette and I felt a glow of pride at the fact that I had got a very good start in the direction of the bad place.

The basis of my overwhelming desire to smoke cigarettes was the fact that cigarette-smoking when I was a boy in Farmington was one of the major sins. It ranked with adultery and just a little ahead of murder and theft. The Preachers called them coffin nails and delivered violent sermons against them, and every once in a while an evangelist would come to town with medical charts showing the effect of tobacco upon the interior human organs. But the fact that it was bad physically for growing boys was seldom stressed at all; we were impressed instead with the fact that God thought it a sin to smoke cigarettes, although it did not appear that it was a sin for the tobacconist to sell them. That was business.

Many efforts were made to reform me after I had begun to smoke. My mother said she had hoped I wouldn’t, but that was all she said, and my father said he did not give a hoot whether I smoked or not, but that he hoped I would not be a fool and overdo it. He himself had learned the art of chewing tobacco when he was a boy of seven in Mississippi, and so far as I have ever been able to learn, God had never called him to account. He died at the age of seventy-nine, suddenly, and a slab of plug-cut was in his pocket. It is impossible for me to believe that God refused him entrance into whatever Heaven there may be on account of his habit, which he thoroughly enjoyed.

But the Preachers and the Brothers and Sisters did not agree with my parents, nor would they admit that it was none of their business. On the contrary, they said that it was the Lord’s business, and since they were the duly accredited agents of the Lord, appointed by Him to lead Farmington into the paths of righteousness, it was their business also. When Brother Fontaine was our Methodist pastor he did not look with disfavor upon chewing, because he himself was seldom without a chew and presumably had an indulgence from God, but he looked upon the cigarette as an invention of the Devil. In this view he was upheld by the Ladies’ Aid Society and the Farmington branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. And the W. C. T. U., with the possible exception of the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals, was and is the world’s best example of an organization maintained for the sole purpose of minding other people’s business.

The hullabaloo over my smoking only made me more determined to smoke until my insides turned black and I was called home by Satan and transformed into a tobacco demon. For that reason I probably smoked too much. As a matter of principle I always lighted a cigarette just in front of the Southern Methodist church, and in front of the home of my uncle, who was an enemy of anything that provided physical pleasure and contentment. I always smoked another as I passed the Northern Methodist church, the scene of the McConnell revival orgy, and still another in front of the Christian church, in memory of Brother Nations. That was four in half a mile, and of course was too many, but sometimes I was not permitted to finish all of them. Frequently a Brother or a Sister, seeing me thus flaunting my sin on the public highway, snatched the nasty thing from my mouth and gave me a lecture that dripped religion and was principally concerned with the fate of boys who defied God and Jesus Christ by smoking cigarettes. One Sister asked me:

“Where did you get the vile things?”

I told her that I had bought them at her husband’s store, and she shrieked:

“You saucy, blasphemous boy!”

But on that particular occasion I was not lectured, although she telephoned my mother that I had been impudent to her. My mother told her it was too bad.

2

I learned to play pinochle when I was about fifteen, only a few months after I had become an accomplished cigarette fiend and was generally considered a fine prospect for Satan, and thereafter was a regular participant in the game that went on every night in the back room of Karl Schliesser’s cigar factory. This was a notable den of evil, and while religion had me in its clutches I thought black magic was practiced there, and that its habitués had communion with the Devil; among us it was believed that God had doubtless never heard of the place or He would have destroyed it with a withering blast of lightning. It was frequented by Germans and other low forms of life, and they were principally Catholics and Lutherans, with a sprinkling of renegade Protestants like myself. The Brothers and Sisters held the opinion that if this crowd had a God at all he must have been a very queer being, for bursts of ribald laughter came from Schliesser’s back room, and there was card-playing, and I do not doubt that occasionally someone gambled.

Schliesser was the Town Socialist, and was looked upon with grave suspicion by the better element, as in those days it was generally recognized that a Socialist was an emissary of the Devil. But the Brothers and Sisters and the Preachers looked with even more suspicion upon Victor Quesnel. In this attitude they had the support of the Catholics. Victor Quesnel was born in France, but he had lived in Farmington for many years. He frequently quoted Voltaire, and appeared to believe that a man’s religion and his belief or disbelief in God was a matter of his own personal taste, and he was therefore regarded as an atheist. As a matter of fact he was probably more truly religious than most of the pious Brothers and Sisters; the principal difference was that he did not try to compel everyone he met to embrace his creed.

Frequently, and without particular regard as to who heard him, Quesnel discussed the advantages of sleeping naked, or, as we say in present-day journalism, undraped. That was his hobby. He said he thought it was a healthful practice, that he slept better without clothing, and that come what might he was going to continue to sleep that way. This was considered heathenish doctrine; some of our finest church members owned stores in which they sold nightgowns and pajamas, and it was felt that Quesnel’s attitude was not only a direct affront to God but was also injurious to business. Moreover, the Brothers and Sisters did not consider such a practice modest; there were scores, perhaps hundreds of people in Farmington who had never in their lives removed all of their clothing. Once at a meeting of the Ladies’ Aid Society I heard an old Sister say that she had reached the age of sixty and had never been entirely undressed; and that when she bathed she kept her eyes closed as she applied the sponge to her body. A great deal of juicy conversation could be overheard at these Ladies’ Aid meetings by a bright young lad who knew where the best keyholes were located.

3

Sunday was much more enjoyable after I had become a sinner and had left Sunday school and the Church to whatever fate the Lord had in store for them. I arose a little later, had a leisurely breakfast and a refreshing quarrel or fight with my brothers and sister, and then went leisurely to my room and as leisurely put on my Sunday suit, with no intention of removing it until I retired for the night. Curiously enough, as soon as I quit going regularly to church and Sunday school I began to wear my Sunday suit all day, and the little voice that I had in the selection of this garment I raised in hopeful pleas for loud checks and glaring colors. No longer did I wish to clothe myself in the sombre blacks suitable for church wear and religious activity; I desired to blossom and bloom in the more violent and pleasant colors of Hell.

Once arrayed in my Sunday suit, I left the house, a cigarette dangling from my lower lip, and my hat, carefully telescoped in the prevailing mode, sitting just so on the side of my head. I tried to time my march downtown so that I would reach Elmwood Seminary just as the young lady students resident there marched across the street, after Sunday school, from the Presbyterian church; they were not permitted to remain at the church during the fifteen or twenty-minute interval because they attracted such hordes of feverish boys intent upon everything but religion. Usually I reached the scene in time, and leaned nonchalantly against the Seminary fence, puffing vigorously and ostentatiously on a cigarette and winking at various and sundry of the girls as they passed in their caps and gowns.

For these smart-aleck activities I was presently placed upon the school’s black list and was not permitted to call upon the one night each month allotted to such social intercourse, but as I soon learned to climb a rope ladder this did not annoy me greatly. Anyhow, calling night at Elmwood Seminary was not very exciting. The procedure was to place a dozen or so chairs about a big room, in pairs but with at least twelve inches between them, in which sat the girls and their callers. In the center sat a gimlet-eyed teacher, constantly ready with Biblical and other uplifting quotations and seeing to it that nothing scandalous occurred. From eight to ten the caller was permitted to engage his lady love in conversation, but it was a rule that everything that was said must be audible to the teacher on guard. Whisperings and gigglings were taboo, and resulted in the young man being placed on the black list, and forbidden thereafter to darken the doors of the institution. But occasionally the teacher relaxed her vigilance for a moment, providing an opportunity to arrange a clandestine meeting. That was the principal reason that the boys of Farmington went to Elmwood on calling nights.

The regular Sunday incident of the Seminary girls having been brought to a satisfactory and successful conclusion, I went on downtown. I was very young then, and I considered myself, in my Sunday suit, a very striking and elegant figure. I thought of myself as a parade, and felt morally certain that the eyes of every girl were upon me, and that their hearts were fluttering with amatory admiration. The Methodist church was only two blocks south of the Presbyterian edifice, and I generally reached it as the Sunday-school pupils trooped out with their arms full of lesson pamphlets and their souls full of salvation, Golden Texts and catechisms. I regarded them pityingly, puffed vaingloriously at my symbol of sin, and went on past the Christian church and the Northern Methodist church and so to McKinney’s, the Post Office Building and the fascinating popcorn and peanut machine.

In the winter time Doss’s barber shop was generally open until noon so Billy Priester could shine the shoes of the young bucks who proposed to defile the Sabbath by gallivanting around with young hussies. It was a favorite loafing place for all abandoned wretches who did not care for the glory that was free in all churches. But in summer we generally sat in front of McKinney’s and the Post Office Building and, when finances permitted, ate popcorn and peanuts, envying Riley Hough as he hurried out now and then to attend to the machine and stuff his mouth with popcorn before hastening back into the store.

All of the young sinners of the town loafed there during the church services, and at twelve o’clock noon we rose in a body and walked down the street to Pelty’s Book Store, where the Sunday papers were distributed. The afternoons were devoted to baseball games and amatory pursuits, and occasionally we went fishing. But this was considered a Cardinal Sin, and was frowned upon by even our liberal element; it was felt that it was a desecration of God’s Day to drag one of His creatures from the river with a cruel fishhook. On week days, of course, fishing was all right, although a waste of time, but on Sunday an expedition to Blumeyer’s Ford, or to Gruner’s Hole, was followed the next morning by buzzing comment all over town, and only a grown man could hope to indulge in such sinful adventures and escape subsequent punishment.

4

It was the custom of our pastors and pious brethren, and of the professional sorcerers who were imported from time to time to cast their spells and shoo the demons away from our housetops, to proclaim loudly and incessantly that our collective morals were compounded of a slice of Sodom and a cut of Gomorrah, with an extract of Babylon to flavor the sorry stew. They worried constantly and fretfully over our amorous activities; in their more feverish discourses appeared significant references to the great difficulty of remaining pure, and in effect they advised our young women to go armed to the teeth, prepared to do battle in defense of their virginity.

In Farmington and other small towns of the Middle West this sort of thing was the principal stock in trade of those who would lead their brethren to the worship of the current god; the evangelist assured his hearers that their town was overrun by harlots, and that brothels abounded in which prominent men abandoned themselves to shameful orgies, while church attendance dwindled, and collections became smaller and smaller, and chicken appeared less and less frequently upon the ministerial table. His tirades were generally in this fashion:

“Shall we permit these painted daughters of Jezebel, these bedizened hussies, to stalk the streets of this fair city and flaunt their sin in the face of the Lord? Shall we permit them to lure our sons and brothers into their vile haunts and ply their nefarious trade in the very shadow of the House of God? No! I say NO! Jesus Christ must live in this town!”

Immediately everyone shouted “Amen, Brother!” and “Praise the Lord!” But it was sometimes difficult to determine whether the congregation praised the Lord for inspiring the evangelist so courageously to defy the harlots, or for permitting him to discover them. If the Man of God could find them, why not the damned, too? Certainly there were always many who wondered if the brother had acquired any good addresses or telephone numbers since coming to town. Not infrequently, indeed, he was stealthily shadowed home by young men eager to settle this question.

These charges and denunciations were repeated, with trimmings, at the meetings for men only which were always a most interesting feature of the revivals. At similar gatherings for women, or ladies, as we called them in small-town journalism, his wife or a devout Sister discussed the question from the feminine viewpoint. What went on at these latter conclaves I do not know, though I can guess, for I have often seen young girls coming out of them giggling and blushing. The meetings for men were juicy, indeed. The evangelist discussed all angles of the subject, and in a very free manner. His own amorous exploits before he was converted were recited in considerable detail, and he painted vivid word pictures of the brothels he had visited, both as a paying client and in the course of his holy work. Almost invariably they were subterranean palaces hung with silks and satins, with soft rugs upon the floor, and filled with a vast multitude of handsome young women, all as loose as ashes. Having thus intimated, with some smirking, that for many years he was almost the sole support of harlotry, he became confidential. He leaned forward and said:

“There are such Dens of the Devil right here in your town!”

This was first-hand information, and immediately there was a stir in the audience, many of his hearers betraying an eagerness to be gone. But before they could get away the evangelist thundered:

“Shall we permit them to continue their wicked practices?”

I always hoped to be present some day when the audience forgot itself and answered that question with the thought that was so plainly in its mind, namely, “Yes!” But, alas, I never heard it, although there was much shouting of “Amen!” and “Glory to God!” These meetings for men only were generally held in the afternoon, and their net result was that the business of the drug store increased immediately, and when night fell bands of young good-for-nothings scurried hither and yon about the town, searching feverishly for the Dens of the Devil. They searched without fear, confident that modern science would save them from any untoward consequences, and knowing that no matter what they did they would go to Heaven if they permitted a preacher to intercede for them in the end, or a priest to sprinkle them with holy water.

But the Dens of the Devil were not found, neither in Farmington nor in any other small town in that region, for the very good reason that they did not exist. The evangelist did not know what he was talking about; he was simply using stock blather which he had found by experience would excite the weak-minded to both sexual and religious emotions. He knew that when they were thus upset they would be less likely to question his ravings--that they would be more pliable in his hands and easier to convert.

Our small towns were not overrun by harlots simply because harlotry could not flourish in a small town. It was economically impossible; there were not enough cash customers to make the scarlet career profitable. Also, the poor girls had to meet too much competition from emotional ladies who had the professional spirit but retained their amateur standing by various technicalities. And harlots, like the rest of us, had to live; they required the same sort of raiment and food that sufficed their virtuous sisters; it was not until they died that they wore nothing but the smoke of Hell and were able to subsist on a diet of brimstone and sulphur.

Many men who in larger communities would have patronized the professionals could not do so in a small town. They could not afford to; it was too dangerous. The moment a woman was suspected of being a harlot she was eagerly watched by everyone from the mayor down to the preachers, and the name of every man seen talking to her, or even looking at her, went winging swiftly from mouth to mouth, and was finally posted on the heavenly bulletin board as that of an immoral wretch. A house in which harlotry was practiced was picketed day and night by small boys eager to learn the forbidden mysteries, and by Brethren and Sisters hopefully sniffing for sin. It was not possible for a harlot to keep her clientèle secret, for the sexual life of a small town is an open book, and news of amorous doings could not travel faster if each had a tabloid newspaper.

Exact statistics, of course, are not available, but it is probably true that no small American town has ever harbored a harlot whose income from professional services was sufficient to feed and clothe her. Few if any such towns have ever been the abode of more than one harlot at a time. When I was a boy every one had its town harlot, just as it had its town sot (this, of course, was before drunkards became extinct) and its town idiot. But she was generally a poor creature who was employed by day as a domestic servant and practiced her ancient art only in her hours of leisure. She turned to it partly for economic reasons, but chiefly because of a great yearning for human companionship, which she could obtain in no other way. She remained in it because she was almost instantly branded a Daughter of Satan, and shunned by good and bad alike. She seldom, if ever, realized that she was doing wrong; her moral standards were those of a bedbug. She thought of harlotry in terms of new ribbons and an occasional pair of shoes, and in terms of social intercourse; she was unmoral rather than immoral, and the proceeds of her profession, to her, were just so much extra spending money.

Small-town men who occasionally visited the larger cities, and there thought nothing of spending from ten to fifty dollars in metropolitan brothels, were very stingy in dealing with the town harlot. They considered a dollar an enormous price for her, and frequently they refused to give her anything. Many small communities were not able to support even a part-time harlot; consequently some members of the craft went from town to town, taking secular jobs and practicing harlotry as a side line until driven out by the godly, or until the inevitable business depression occurred. I recall one who made several towns along the O. K. Railroad in Northeastern Missouri as regularly as the shoe drummers. Her studio was always an empty box car on the town siding, and she had a mania for inscribing in such cars the exact dates and hours of her adventures, and her honoraria. It was not unusual to find in a car some such inscription as this:

“Ten P.M., July 8. Fifty cents.”

These writings, scrawled in lead pencil or with a bit of chalk, were signed “Box Car Molly.” Once, in a car from which I had unloaded many heavy bags of cement, I came across what seemed to be a pathetic bit of very early, and apparently authentic, Box-Car-Molliana. On the wall was this:

“I was ruined in this car May 10.

“BOX CAR MOLLY.”

Our town harlot in Farmington was a scrawny creature called variously Fanny Fewclothes and Hatrack, but usually the latter in deference to her figure. When she stood with her arms outstretched she bore a remarkable resemblance to the tall hatracks then in general use in our homes, and since she was always most amiable and obliging, she was frequently asked to pose thus for the benefit of drummers and other infidels. In time, she came to take a considerable pride in this accomplishment; she referred to herself as a model, and talked vaguely of abandoning her wicked life and going to St. Louis, where she was sure she could make a living posing for artists.

Six days a week Hatrack was a competent and more or less virtuous drudge employed by one of our best families, but Sunday was her day off, and she then, in turn, offered her soul to the Lord and went to the Devil. For the latter purpose she utilized both the Masonic and Catholic cemeteries. Hatrack’s regular Sunday-night parade, her descent from righteousness into sin, was one of the most fascinating events of the week, and promptly after supper those of us who did not have engagements to take young ladies to church (which was practically equivalent to publishing the banns) went downtown to the loafing place in front of the Post Office and waited impatiently.

On week days Hatrack turned a deaf ear to the blandishments of our roués, but on Sunday night she was more gracious. This, however, was not until she had gone to church and had been given to understand, tacitly but none the less clearly, that there was no room for her in the Kingdom of Heaven. Our Sunday-night services usually began about eight o’clock, following the meetings of the various young people’s societies. At seven-thirty, regardless of the weather, the angular figure of Hatrack could be discerned coming down the hill from the direction of the cemeteries. She lived somewhere in that section and worked out by the day. She was always dressed in her best, and in her eyes was the light of a great resolve. She was going to church, and there was that in her walk and manner which said that thereafter she was going to lead a better life.

There was always a group of men waiting for her around the Post Office. But although several muttered “Here she comes!” it was not good form to speak to her then, and she walked past them as if she had not seen them. But they, with their wide knowledge of the vagaries of the Agents of God, grinned hopefully and settled down to wait. They knew she would be back. She went on up the street past the Court House and turned into the Northern Methodist church, where she took a seat in the last row. All about her were empty seats; if they were not empty when she got there they were soon emptied. No one spoke to her. No one asked her to come to Jesus. No one held out a welcoming hand. No one prayed for her. No one offered her a hymn book. At the protracted meetings and revivals, which she invariably attended, none of the Brothers and Sisters tried to convert her; she was a Scarlet Woman and belonged to the Devil. There was no place for her in a respectable congregation. They could not afford to be seen talking to her, even in church, where God’s love, by their theory, made brothers and sisters of us all.

It was pitiful to watch her; she listened to the Word with such rapt attention; she sang the hymns with such fanatical fervor, and she so yearned for the comforts of that barbaric religion and the blessings of easy intercourse with decent people. But she never got them. From the Christians and their God she got nothing but scorn. Of all the sinners in our town Hatrack would have been easiest to convert; she was so pathetically eager for salvation. If a Preacher, or a Brother, or a Sister, had so much as spoken a kind word to her she would have dropped to her knees and given up her soul to the Methodist God. And her conversion, in all likelihood, would have been permanent, for she was not mentally equipped for a struggle against the grandiose improbabilities of revealed religion. If someone had told her, as I was told, that God was an old man with long whiskers, she would not have called Him “Daddy,” as some of her more flippant city sisters might have done; she would have accepted Him and gloried in Him.

But she was not plucked from the burning, for the workers for the Lord would have nothing to do with her, and by the end of the service her eyes had grown sullen and her lip had curled upward in a sneer. Before the final hymn was sung and the benediction pronounced upon the congregation, she got to her feet and left the church. None tried to stop her; she was not wanted in the House of God. I have seen her sit alone and miserably unhappy while the Preacher bellowed a sermon about forgiveness, with the whole church rocking to a chorus of sobbing, moaning amens as he told the stories of various Biblical harlots, and how God had forgiven them.

But for Hatrack there was no forgiveness. Mary Magdalene was a saint in Heaven, but Hatrack remained a harlot in Farmington. Every Sunday night for years she went through the same procedure. She was hopeful always that someone would speak to her and make a place for her, that the Brothers and Sisters who talked so volubly about the grace and the mercy of God would offer her some of the religion that they dripped so freely over everyone else in town. But they did not, and so she went back down the street to the Post Office, swishing her skirts and brazenly offering herself to all who desired her. The men who had been waiting for her, and who had known that she would come, leered at her and hailed her with obscene speech and gesture. And she gave them back leer for leer, meeting their sallies with giggles, and motioning with her head toward the cemeteries.