Elmer Gantry (10 page)

“If you agree with me about anything, I withdraw it,” said Horace.

“All you have to do,” said Zenz, “is to get some sound and perfectly meaningless doctrine and keep repeating it. You
won’t bore the laymen—in fact the only thing they resent is something that IS new, so they have to work their brains. Oh,
no, Father Carp—the Episcopal pulpit for actors that aren’t good enough to get on the stage, but the good old Baptist fold
for realists!”

“You make me tired, Harry!” complained Eddie. “You just want to show off, that’s all. You’re a lot better Baptist and a
lot better Christian than you let on to be, and I can prove it. Folks wouldn’t go on listening to your sermons unless they
carried conviction. No sir! You can fool folks once or twice with a lot of swell-sounding words but in the long run it’s
sincerity they look for. And one thing that makes me know you’re on the right side is that you don’t practise open
communion. Golly, I feel that everything we Baptists stand for is threatened by those darn’ so-called liberals that are
beginning to practise open communion.”

“Rats!” grumbled Harry. “Of all the fool Baptist egotisms, close communion is the worst! Nobody but people WE consider
saved to be allowed to take communion with us! Nobody can meet God unless we introduce ’em! Self-appointed guardians of the
blood and body of Jesus Christ! Whew!”

“Absolutely,” from Horace Carp. “And there is absolutely no Scriptural basis for close communion.”

“There certainly is!” shrieked Eddie. “Frank, where’s your Bible?”

“Gee, I left it in O.T.E. Where’s yours, Don?”

“Well, I’ll be switched! I had the darn’ thing here just this evening,” lamented Don Pickens, after a search.

“Oh, I remember. I was killing a cockroach with it. It’s on top of your wardrobe,” said Elmer.

“Gee, honest, you hadn’t ought to kill cockroaches with a Bible!” mourned Eddie Fislinger. “Now here’s the Bible, good
and straight, for close communion, Harry. It says in First Corinthians, 11:27 and 29: ‘Whoever shall eat this bread and
drink this cup of the Lord unworthily shall be guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord. For he that eateth and drinketh
unworthily eateth and drinketh damnation to himself.’ And how can there be a worthy Christian unless he’s been baptized by
immersion?”

“I do wonder sometimes,” mused Frank Shallard, “if we aren’t rather impious, we Baptists, to set ourselves up as the
keepers of the gates of God, deciding just who is righteous, who is worthy to commune.”

“But there’s nothing else we can do,” explained Eddie. “The Baptist Church, being the only pure Scriptural church, is the
one real church of God, and we’re not setting ourselves up—we’re just following God’s ordinances.”

Horace Carp had also been reveling in the popular Mizpah sport of looking up Biblical texts to prove a preconceived
opinion. “I don’t find anything here about Baptists,” he said.

“Nor about your doggoned ole Episcopalians, either—darn’ snobs! and the preachers wearing nightshirts!” from Eddie.

“You bet your life you find something—it talks about bishops, and that means Episcopal bishops—the papes and the
Methodists are uncanonical bishops,” rejoiced Horace. “I’ll bet you two dollars and sixty-seven cents I wind up as an
Episcopal bishop, and, believe me, I’ll be high-church as hell—all the candles I can get on the altar.”

Harry Zenz was speculating, “I suppose it’s unscientific to believe that because I happen to be a Baptist practitioner
myself and see what word-splitting, text-twisting, applause-hungry, job-hunting, medieval-minded second-raters even the
biggest Baptist leaders are, therefore the Baptist Church is the worst of the lot. I don’t suppose it’s really any worse
than the Presbyterian or the Congregational or Disciples or Lutheran or any other. But—Say, you, Fislinger, ever occur to
you how dangerous it is, this Bible-worship? You and I might have to quit preaching and go to work. You tell the muttonheads
that the Bible contains absolutely everything necessary for salvation, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Then what’s the use of having any preachers? Any church? Let people stay home and read the Bible!”

“Well—well—it says—”

The door was 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!”

The Reverend Jacob Trosper, D. D., Ph. D., LL. D., dean and chief executive of Mizpah Theological Seminary, and Professor
of Practical Theology and Homiletics, was a hard-faced active man with a large active voice. His cheeks were gouged with two
deep channels. His eyebrows were heavy. His hair, now gray and bristly, must once have been rusty, like Eddie Fislinger’s.
He would have made an excellent top-sergeant. He looked through the students and let them understand that he knew their sins
and idlenesses before they confessed them.

Elmer was afraid of Dean Trosper. When he was summoned to the dean’s office, the morning after the spiritual conference
in Frank Shallard’s room, he was uneasy.

He found Frank with the dean.

“God! Frank’s been tattling about my doings with women!”

“Brother Gantry,” said the dean.

“Yes, sir!”

“I have an appointment which should give you experience and a little extra money. It’s a country church down at
Schoenheim, eleven miles from here, on the spur line of the Ontario, Omaha and Pittsburgh. You will hold regular Sunday
morning services and Sunday School; if you are able to work up afternoon or evening services and prayer meeting, so much the
better. The pay will be ten dollars a Sunday. If there’s to be anything extra for extra work—that’s up to you and your
flock. I’d suggest that you go down there on a hand-car. I’m sure you can get the section-gang boss here to lend you one, as
it’s for the Lord’s work, and the boss’ brother does a lot of gardening here. I’m going to send Brother Shallard with you to
conduct the Sunday School and get some experience. He has a particularly earnest spirit—which it wouldn’t entirely hurt you
to emulate, Brother Gantry—but he’s somewhat shy in contact with sin-hardened common people.

“Now, boys, this is just a small church, but never forget that it’s priceless souls that I’m entrusting to your keeping;
and who knows but that you may kindle there such a fire as may some day illumine all the world . . . providing, Brother
Gantry, you eliminate the worldly things I suspect you of indulging in!”

Elmer was delighted. It was his first real appointment. In Kansas, this summer, he had merely filled other people’s
pulpits for two or three weeks at a time.

He’d show ’em! Some of these fellows that thought he was just a mouth-artist! Show ’em how he could build up a church
membership, build up the collections, get ’em all going with his eloquence— and, of course, carry the message of salvation
into darkened hearts.

It would be mighty handy to have the extra ten a week—and maybe more if he could kid the Schoenheim deacons properly.

His first church . . . his own . . . and Frank had to take his orders!

In the virginal days of 1905 section gangs went out to work on the railway line not by gasoline power but on a hand-car,
a platform with two horizontal bars worked up and down like pump-handles.

On a hand-car Elmer and Frank Shallard set out for their first charge. They did not look particularly clerical as they
sawed at the handles; it was a chilly November Sunday morning, and they wore shabby greatcoats. Elmer had a moth-eaten plush
cap over his ears, Frank exhibited absurd ear-muffs under a more absurd derby, and both had borrowed red flannel mittens
from the section gang.

The morning was icily brilliant. Apple orchards glistened in the frost, and among the rattling weed-stalks by the
worm-fences quail were whistling.

Elmer felt his lungs free of library dust as he pumped. He broadened his shoulders, rejoiced in sweating, felt that his
ministry among real men and living life was begun. He pitied the pale Frank a little, and pumped the harder . . . and made
Frank pump the harder . . . up and down, up and down, up and down. It was agony to the small of his back and shoulders, now
growing soft, to labor on the up-grade, where the shining rails toiled round the curves through gravel cuts. But downhill,
swooping toward frosty meadows and the sound of cowbells in the morning sun, he whooped with exhilaration, and struck up a
boisterous:

The Schoenheim church was a dingy brown box with a toy steeple, in a settlement consisting of the church, the station, a
blacksmith shop, two stores, and half a dozen houses. But at least thirty buggies were gathered along the rutty street or in
the carriage-sheds behind the church; at least seventy people had come to inspect their new pastor; and they stood in gaping
circles, staring between frosty damp mufflers and visored fur caps.

“I’m scared to death!” murmured Frank, as they strode up the one street from the station, but Elmer felt healthy, proud,
expansive. His own church, small but somehow—somehow different from these ordinary country meeting-houses—quite a
nice-shaped steeple—not one of those shacks with no steeple at all! And his people, waiting for him, their attention flowing
into him and swelling him—

He threw open his overcoat, held it back with his hand imperially poised on his left hip, and let them see not only the
black broadcloth suit bought this last summer for his ordination but something choice he had added since—elegant white
piping at the opening of his vest.

A red-faced moustached man swaggered up to greet them, “Brother Gantry? And Brother Shallard? I’m Barney Bains, one of
the deacons. Pleased to meet you. The Lord give power to your message. Some time since we had any preachin’ here, and I
guess we’re all pretty hungry for spiritual food and the straight gospel. Bein’ from Mizpah, I guess there’s no danger you
boys believe in this open communion!”

Frank had begun to worry, “Well, what I feel is—” when Elmer interrupted him with a very painful bunt in the side, and
chanted with holy joy:

“Pleased meet you, Brother Bains. Oh, Brother Shallard and I are absolutely sound both on immersion and close communion.
We trust you will pray for us, Brother, that the Holy Ghost may be present in this work today, and that all the brethren may
rejoice in a great awakening and a bountiful harvest!”

Deacon Bains and all who heard him muttered, saint to saint, “He’s pretty young yet, but he’s got the right idee. I’m
sure we’re going to have real rousing preaching. Don’t think much of Brother Shallard, though. Kind of a nice-looking young
fella, but dumm in the head. Stands there like a bump on a log. Well, he’s good enough to teach the kids in Sunday
School.”

Brother Gantry was shaking hands all round. His sanctifying ordination, or it might have been his summer of bouncing from
pulpit to pulpit, had so elevated him that he could greet them as impressively and fraternally as a sewing-machine agent. He
shook hands with a good grip, he looked at all the more aged sisters as though he were moved to give them a holy kiss, he
said the right things about the weather, and by luck or inspiration it was to the most acidly devout man in Boone County
that he quoted a homicidal text from Malachi.

As he paraded down the aisle, leading his flock, he panted:

“Got ’em already! I can do something to wake these hicks up, where gas-bags like Frank or Carp would just chew the rag.
How could I of felt so down in the mouth and so—uh—so carnal last week? Lemme at that pulpit!”

They faced him in hard straight pews, rugged heads seen against the brown wall and the pine double doors grained to mimic
oak; they gratifyingly crowded the building, and at the back stood shuffling young men with unshaven chins and pale blue
neckties.

He felt power over them while he trolled out the chorus of “The Church in the Wildwood.”

His text was from Proverbs: “Hatred stirreth up strifes: but love covereth all sins.”

He seized the sides of the pulpit with his powerful hands, glared at the congregation, decided to look benevolent after
all, and exploded:

“In the hustle and bustle of daily life I wonder how many of us stop to think that in all that is highest and best we are
ruled not by even our most up-and-coming efforts but by Love? What is Love— the divine Love of which the—the great singer
teaches us in Proverbs? It is the rainbow that comes after the dark cloud. It is the morning star and it is also the evening
star, those being, as you all so well know, the brightest stars we know. It shines upon the cradle of the little one and
when life has, alas, departed, to come no more, you find it still around the quiet tomb. What is it inspires all great
men—be they preachers or patriots or great business men? What is it, my brethren, but Love? Ah, it fills the world with
melody, with such sacred melodies as we have just indulged in together, for what is music? What, my friends, is music? Ah,
what indeed is music but the voice of Love!”

He explained that hatred was low.

However, for the benefit of the more leathery and zealous deacons down front, he permitted them to hate all Catholics,
all persons who failed to believe in hell and immersion, and all rich mortgage-holders, wantoning in the betraying smiles of
scarlet women, each of whom wore silk and in her bejeweled hand held a ruby glass of perfidious wine.

He closed by lowering his voice to a maternal whisper and relating a totally imaginary but most improving experience with
a sinful old gentleman who on his bed of pain had admitted, to Elmer’s urging, that he ought to repent immediately, but who
put it off too long, died amid his virtuous and grief-stricken daughters, and presumably went straight to the devil.

When Elmer had galloped down to the door to shake hands with such as did not remain for Sabbath School, sixteen several
auditors said in effect, “Brother, that was a most helpful sermon and elegantly expressed,” and he wrung their hands with a
boyish gratitude beautiful to see.

Deacon Bains patted his shoulder. “I’ve never heard so young a preacher hand out such fine doctrine, Brother. Meet my
daughter Lulu.”

And she was there, the girl for whom he had been looking ever since he had come to Mizpah.

Lulu Bains was a gray-and-white kitten with a pink ribbon. She had sat at the back of the church, behind the stove, and
he had not seen her. He looked down at her thirstily. His excitement at having played his sermon to such applause was
nothing beside his excitement over the fact that he would have her near him in his future clerical labors. Life was a
promising and glowing thing as he held her hand and tried not to sound too insistently affectionate. “Such a pleasure to
meet you, Sister Lulu.”

Lulu was nineteen or twenty. She had a diminutive class of twelve-year-old boys in the Sunday School. Elmer had intended
to sneak out during Sunday School, leaving Frank Shallard responsible, and find a place where he could safely smoke a
Pittsburgh stogie, but in view of this new spiritual revelation he hung about, beaming with holy approbation of the good
work and being manly and fraternal with the little boys in Lulu’s class.

“If you want to grow up and be big fellows, regular sure-enough huskies, you just listen to what Miss Bains has to tell
you about how Solomon built that wonderful big ole temple,” he crooned at them; and if they twisted and giggled in shyness,
at least Lulu smiled at him . . . gray-and-white kitten with sweet kitten eyes . . . small soft kitten, who purred, “Oh,
now, Brother Gantry, I’m just so scared I don’t hardly dare teach” . . . big eyes that took him into their depths, till he
heard her lisping as the voice of angels, larks, and whole orchestras of flutes.

He could not let her go at the end of Sunday School. He must hold her—

“Oh, Sister Lulu, come see the hand-car Frank and I—Brother Shallard and I—came down on. The FUN-niest! Just laugh your
head off!”

As the section gang passed through Schoenheim at least ten times a week, hand-cars could have been no astounding novelty
to Lulu, but she trotted beside him, and stared prettily, and caroled, “Oh, hon-est! Did you come down on THAT? Well, I
never!”

She shook hands cheerfully with both of them. He thought jealously that she was as cordial to Frank as to himself.

“He better watch out and not go fooling round MY girl!” Elmer reflected, as they pumped back toward Babylon.

He did not congratulate Frank on having overcome his dread of stolid country audiences (Frank had always lived in cities)
or on having made Solomon’s temple not merely a depressing object composed of a substance called “cubits” but an actual
shrine in which dwelt an active and terrifying god.

For two Sundays now Elmer had striven to impress Lulu not only as an efficient young prophet but as a desirable man.
There were always too many people about. Only once did he have her alone. They walked half a mile then to call on a sick old
woman. On their way Lulu had fluttered at him (gray-and-white kitten in a close bonnet of soft fuzzy gray, which he wanted
to stroke).

“I suppose you’re just bored to death by my sermons,” he fished.

“Oh, nnnno! I think they’re just wonderful!”

“Do you, honest?”

“Honest, I do!”

He looked down at her childish face till he had caught her eyes, then, jocularly:

“My, but this wind is making the little cheeks and the cute lips awful’ red! Or I guess maybe some fella must of been
kissing ’em before church!”

“Oh, no—”

She looked distressed, almost frightened.

“Whoa up!” he counseled himself. “You’ve got the wrong track. Golly, I don’t believe she’s as much of a fusser as I
thought she was. Really is kinda innocent. Poor kid, shame to get her all excited. Oh, thunder, won’t hurt her a bit to have
a little educated love-making!”

He hastily removed any possible blots on his clerical reputation:

“Oh, I was joking. I just meant—be a shame if as lovely a girl as you weren’t engaged. I suppose you are engaged, of
course?”

“No. I liked a boy here awfully, but he went to Cleveland to work, and I guess he’s kind of forgotten me.”

“Oh, that is really too bad!”

Nothing could be stronger, more dependable, more comforting, than the pressure of his fingers on her arm. She looked
grateful; and when she came to the sick-room and heard Brother Gantry pray, long, fervently, and with the choicest words
about death not really mattering nor really hurting (the old woman had cancer) then Lulu also looked worshipful.

On their way back he made his final probe:

“But even if you aren’t engaged, Sister Lulu, I’ll bet there’s a lot of the young fellows here that’re crazy about
you.”

“No, honest there aren’t. Oh, I go round some with a second cousin of mine—Floyd Naylor—but, my! he’s so slow, he’s no
fun.”

The Rev. Mr. Gantry planned to provide fun.