No one knew exactly how he did it; he went about it all so quietly that the thing was done before they knew that it was done. But probably the greatest asset that he had was that from the very beginning no one thought of him as a preacher. And the proof of this was that they called him one. They would not have dared to take such liberties with any other clergyman in town. Besides this, Preacher didn’t preach to them; he didn’t sermonize in hour-long harangues; he didn’t pray for them in twenty-minute invocations; he did not thunder at them from the pulpit, nor did he work all the stops upon his ministerial vocal chords: he did not coo like a dove, roar like a lion, or bleat like a lamb. He had a trick worth six or eight of these.
He began to drop in to see the boys in their rooms. There was something so casual and so friendly in his visits that he put everyone at ease at once. In the most pleasant way he managed to convey to them that he was one of them. He was a well-conditioned man of fifty years, with sandy hair, and a lean face that had great dignity, but also a quality that was very friendly and attractive. In addition to this, he dressed in rather casual-looking clothes—rough, shaggy tweeds, grey flannel trousers, thick-soled shoes—all somewhat worn-looking, but making the boys wish vaguely that they knew where he got them, and wonder if they could get some like them. He would come by and sing out cheerfully:
“Working? I’ll not stay if you are. I was just passing by.”
At this, there would be an instant scraping of chairs, the scramble of feet, and a chorus of voices assuring him most earnestly that no one was working, and would he please sit down.
Upon receiving these assurances, he would sit down, tossing his hat as he did so upon the top tier of the double-decker cot, tilt back comfortably against the wall in an old creaking chair, one foot hinged on the bottom round, and produce his pipe—a blackened old briar that seemed to have been seasoned in the forge of Vulcan—load it with fragrant tobacco from an oil-skin pouch, strike a match, and begin to puff contentedly, speaking in between the puffs:
“Now I—I—like—a pipe!”—puff, puff—“You—younger—blades”—puff, puff—“can—have—your—cigarettes”—puff, puff, puff—“but as for me”—he puffed vigorously for a moment—“there’s—nothing—that—can—give—me”—puff, puff puff—“quite the comfort—of this—old—briar—pipe!”
Oh, the gusto of it! The appeasement of it! The deep, fragrant, pungent, and soul-filling contentment of it! Could anyone think that such a man as this would fail? Or doubt that within a week half the boys would be smoking pipes?
So Preacher would have got along anyway without Jerry Alsop’s help, and yet Jerry surely played a part in it. It was Jerry who had largely inaugurated the series of friendly meetings in students’ rooms, in which Preacher took the leading and most honored role. Preacher, in fact, was one of those men who at the time were so busily engaged in the work of “relating the Church to modern life”—in his own more pungent phrase, of “bringing God to the campus.” His methods of doing so were, as Jerry said, “perfectly delightful.”
“Christ,” Preacher would begin in one of those charming gatherings in student rooms, which found eight or ten eager youths sprawled around the floor in various postures, a half-dozen more perched up on the rickety tiers of a double-decker cot, a few more hanging out the windows, eagerly drinking in the whole pungent brew of wit, of humor, of good-natured practicality, life, and Christianity, through shifting planes of pipe and cigarette smoke—“Christ,” Preacher would continue, puffing on his pipe in that delightfully whimsical way of his, “was a fellow who never made a Six in philosophy. He was a fellow who started out on the scrub team, and wound up playing quarterback on the Varsity. But if He’d had to go on playing with the scrubs”—this was thrown out perhaps, as a kind of sop of encouragement to certain potentially permanent scrubs who might be within the range of hearing—“if Christ had had to go on playing with the scrubs, why,” said Preacher Reed, “He would have made a go of it. You see”—here he puffed thoughtfully on his seasoned pipe for a moment—“the point is, fellows—that’s the thing I want you to understand—Christ was a fellow who always made a go of everything. Now Paul”—for a moment more Preacher puffed meditatively on his blackened briar, and then, chuckling suddenly in his delightful way, he shook his head and cried—“now Paul! Ah-hah-hah—that’s a different story! Paul was a bird of a different feather! There’s a horse of quite another color! Paul was a fellow who flunked out.”