a flashing wall, and from the Kansas fields came soft airs and the whistle of meadow larks.
Students loafed at their windows, calling down to friends; they played catch on the campus; they went bareheaded and wrote a great deal of poetry; and the Terwillinger baseball team defeated Fogelquist College.
Still Elmer did not receive his divine Call.
By day, playing catch, kicking up his heels, belaboring his acquaintances, singing "The happiest days that ever were, we knew at old Terwillinger" on a fence fondly believed to resemble the Yale fence, or tramping by himself through the minute forest of cottonwood and willow by Tunker Creek, he expanded with the expanding year and knew happiness.
The nights were unadulterated hell.
He felt guilty that he had no Call, and he went to the president about it in mid-May.
Dr. Quarles was thoughtful, and announced:
"Brother Elmer, the last thing I'd ever want to do, in fairness to the spirit of the ministry, would be to create an illusion of a Call when there was none present. That would be like the pagan hallucinations worked on the poor suffering followers of Roman Catholicism. Whatever else he may be, a Baptist preacher must be free from illusions; he must found his work on good hard scientific facts—the proven facts of the Bible, and substitutionary atonement, which even pragmatically we know to be true, because it works. No, no! But at the same time I feel sure the voice of God is calling you, if you can but hear it, and I want to help you lift the veil of worldliness which still, no doubt, deafens your inner ear. Will you come to my house tomorrow evening? We'll take the matter to the Lord in prayer."
It was all rather dreadful.
That kindly spring evening, with a breeze fresh in the branches of the sycamores, President Quarles had shut the windows and drawn the blinds in his living-room, an apartment filled with crayon portraits of Baptist worthies, red-plush chairs, and leaded-glass unit bookcases containing the lay writings of the more poetic clergy. The president had gathered as assistants in prayer the more aged and fundamentalist ex-pastors on the faculty and the more milky and elocutionary of the Y. M. C. A. leaders, headed by Eddie Fislinger.
