Elmer Gantry (16 page)

In that era long-distance telephoning was an uncommon event, but Eversley, deacon and lawyer, was a bustler. When the new
preacher had not appeared by six on Saturday afternoon, Eversley telephoned to Babylon, waited while Dean Trosper was
fetched to the Babylon central, and spoke with considerable irritation about the absence of the ecclesiastical hired
hand.

“I’ll send you Brother Hudkins—a very fine preacher, living here now, retired. He’ll take the midnight train,” said Dean
Trosper.

To the Mr. Hudkins the dean said, “And look around and see if you can find anything of Brother Gantry. I’m worried about
him. The poor boy was simply in agony over a most unfortunate private matter . . . apparently.”

Now Mr. Hudkins had for several years conducted a mission on South Clark Street in Chicago, and he knew a good many
unholy things. He had seen Elmer Gantry in classes at Mizpah. When he had finished Easter morning services in Monarch, he
not only went to the police and to the hospitals but began a round of the hotels, restaurants, and bars. Thus it came to
pass that while Elmer was merrily washing lobster down with California claret, stopping now and then to kiss the blonde
beside him and (by request) to repeat his toast, that evening, he was being observed from the café door by the Reverend Mr.
Hudkins in the enjoyable rô1e of avenging angel.

When Elmer telephoned Eversley, Monday morning, to explain his sickness, the deacon snapped, “All right. Got somebody
else.”

“But, well, say, Dean Trosper thought you and the committee might like to talk over a semi-permanent arrangement—”

“Nope, nope, nope.”

Returned to Babylon, Elmer went at once to the office of the dean.

One look at his expression was enough.

The dean concluded two minutes of the most fluent descriptions with:

“—the faculty committee met this morning, and you are fired from Mizpah. Of course you remain an ordained Baptist
minister. I could get your home association to cancel your credentials, but it would grieve them to know what sort of a
lying monster they sponsored. Also, I don’t want Mizpah mixed up in such a scandal. But if I ever hear of you in any Baptist
pulpit, I’ll expose you. Now I don’t suppose you’re bright enough to become a saloon-keeper, but you ought to make a pretty
good bartender. I’ll leave your punishment to your midnight thoughts.”

Elmer whined, “You hadn’t ought—you ought not to talk to me like that! Doesn’t it say in the Bible you ought to forgive
seventy times seven—”

“This is eighty times seven. Get out!”

So the Reverend Mr. Gantry surprisingly ceased to be, for practical purposes, a Reverend at all.

He thought of fleeing to his mother, but he was ashamed; of fleeing to Lulu, but he did not dare.

He heard that Eddie Fislinger had been yanked to Schoenheim to marry Lulu and Floyd Naylor . . . a lonely grim affair by
lamplight.

“They might have AST me, anyway,” grumbled Elmer, as he packed.

He went back to Monarch and the friendliness of Ad Locust. He confessed that he had been a minister, and was forgiven. By
Friday that week Elmer had become a traveling salesman for the Pequot Farm Implement Company.

Elmer gantry was twenty-eight and for two years he had been a traveling salesman for the Pequot Company.

Harrows and rakes and corn-planters; red plows and gilt-striped green wagons; catalogues and order-lists; offices glassed
off from dim warehouses; shirt-sleeved dealers on high stools at high desks; the bar at the corner; stifling small hotels
and lunch-rooms; waiting for trains half the night in foul boxes of junction stations, where the brown slatted benches were
an agony to his back; trains, trains, trains; trains and time-tables and joyous return to his headquarters in Denver; a
drunk, a theater, and service in a big church.

He wore a checked suit, a brown derby, striped socks, the huge ring of gold serpents and an opal which he had bought long
ago, flower-decked ties, and what he called “fancy vests”—garments of yellow with red spots, of green with white stripes, of
silk or daring chamois.

He had had a series of little loves, but none of them important enough to continue.

He was not unsuccessful. He was a good talker, a magnificent hand-shaker, his word could often be depended on, and he
remembered most of the price-lists and all of the new smutty stories. In the office at Denver he was popular with “the
boys.” He had one infallible “stunt”—a burlesque sermon. It was known that he had studied to be a preacher, but had
courageously decided that it was no occupation for a “real two-fisted guy,” and that he had “told the profs where they got
off.” A promising and commendable fellow; conceivably sales-manager some day.

Whatever his dissipations, Elmer continued enough exercise to keep his belly down and his shoulders up. He had been
shocked by Deacon Bains’ taunt that he was growing soft, and every morning in his hotel room he unhumorously did
calisthenics for fifteen minutes; evenings he bowled or boxed in Y.M.C.A. gymnasiums, or, in towns large enough, solemnly
swam up and down tanks like a white porpoise. He felt lusty, and as strong as in Terwillinger days.

Yet Elmer was not altogether happy.

He appreciated being free of faculty rules, free of the guilt which in seminary days had followed his sprees at Monarch,
free of the incomprehensible debates of Harry Zenz and Frank Shallard, yet he missed leading the old hymns, and the sound of
his own voice, the sense of his own power, as he held an audience by his sermon. Always on Sunday evenings (except when he
had an engagement with a waitress or a chambermaid) he went to the evangelical church nearest his hotel. He enjoyed
criticizing the sermon professionally.

“Golly, I could put it all over that poor boob! The straight gospel is all right, but if he’d only stuck in a couple
literary allusions, and lambasted the saloon-keepers more, he’d ‘ve had ’em all het up.”

He sang so powerfully that despite a certain tobacco and whisky odor the parsons always shook hands with extra warmth,
and said they were glad to see you with us this evening, Brother.

When he encountered really successful churches, his devotion to the business became a definite longing to return to
preaching: he ached to step up, push the minister out of his pulpit, and take charge, instead of sitting back there
unnoticed and unadmired, as though he were an ordinary layman.

“These chumps would be astonished if they knew what I am!” he reflected.

After such an experience it was vexatious on Monday morning to talk with a droning implement-dealer about discounts on
manure-spreaders; it was sickening to wait for train-time in a cuspidor— filled hotel lobby when he might have been in a
church office superior with books, giving orders to pretty secretaries and being expansive and helpful to consulting
sinners. He was only partly solaced by being able to walk openly into a saloon and shout, “Straight rye, Bill.”

On Sunday evening in a Western Kansas town he ambled to a shabby little church and read on the placard outside:

“Oh, Gawd!” protested Elmer. “Eddie Fislinger! About the kind of burg he would land in! A lot he knows about the meaning
of redemption or any other dogma, that human wood-chuck! Or about dancing! If he’d ever been with me in Denver and shaken a
hoof at Billy Portifero’s place, he’d have something to hand out. Fislinger—must be the same guy. I’ll sit down front and
put his show on the fritz!”

Eddie Fislinger’s church was an octagonal affair, with the pulpit in one angle, an arrangement which produced a
fascinating, rather dizzy effect, reminiscent of the doctrine of predestination. The interior was of bright yellow, hung
with many placards: “Get Right With God,” and “Where Will You Spend Eternity?” and “The Wisdom of This World is Foolishness
with God.” The Sunday School Register behind the pulpit communicated the tidings that the attendance today had been
forty-one, as against only thirty-nine last week, and the collection eighty-nine cents, as against only seventy-seven.

The usher, a brick-layer in a clean collar, was impressed by Elmer’s checked suit and starched red-speckled shirt and
took him to the front row.

Eddie flushed most satisfactorily when he saw Elmer from the pulpit, started to bow, checked it, looked in the general
direction of Heaven, and tried to smile condescendingly. He was nervous at the beginning of his sermon, but apparently he
determined that his attack on sin—which hitherto had been an academic routine with no relation to any of his appallingly
virtuous flock—might be made real. With his squirrel-toothed and touching earnestness he looked down at Elmer and as good as
told him to go to hell and be done with it. But he thought better of it, and concluded that God might be able to give even
Elmer Gantry another chance if Elmer stopped drinking, smoking, blaspheming, and wearing checked suits. (If he did not refer
to Elmer by name, he certainly did by poisonous glances.)

Elmer was angry, then impressively innocent, then bored. He examined the church and counted the audience—twenty-seven
excluding Eddie and his wife. (There was no question but that the young woman looking adoringly up from the front pew was
Eddie’s consort. She had the pitifully starved and home-tailored look of a preacher’s wife.) By the end of the sermon, Elmer
was being sorry for Eddie. He sang the closing hymn, “He’s the Lily of the Valley,” with a fine unctuous grace, coming down
powerfully on the jubilant “Hallelujah,” and waited to shake hands with Eddie forgivingly.

“Well, well, well,” they both said; and “What are you doing in these parts?” and Eddie: “Wait till everybody’s gone—must
have a good old-fashioned chin with you, old fellow!”

As he walked with the Fislingers to the parsonage, a block away, and sat with them in the living-room, Elmer wanted to be
a preacher again, take the job away from Eddie and do it expertly; yet he was repulsed by the depressing stinginess of
Eddie’s life. His own hotel bedrooms were drab enough, but they were free of nosey parishioners, and they were as luxurious
as this parlor with its rain-blotched ceiling, bare pine floor, sloping chairs, and perpetual odor of diapers. There were
already, in two years of Eddie’s marriage, two babies, looking as though they were next-door to having been conceived
without sin; and there was a perfectly blank-faced sister-inlaw who cared for the children during services.

Elmer wanted to smoke, and for all his training in the eternal mysteries he could not decide whether it would be more
interesting to annoy Eddie by smoking or to win him by refraining.

He smoked, and wished he hadn’t.

Eddie noticed it, and his reedy wife noticed it, and the sister-inlaw gaped at it, and they labored at pretending they
hadn’t.

Elmer felt large and sophisticated and prosperous in their presence, like a city broker visiting a farmer cousin and
wondering which of his tales of gilded towers would be simple enough for belief.

Eddie gave him the news of Mizpah. Frank Shallard had a small church in a town called Catawba, the other end of the state
of Winnemac from the seminary. There had been some difficulty over his ordination, for he had been shaky about even so clear
and proven a fact as the virgin birth. But his father and Dean Trosper had vouched for him, and Frank had been ordained.
Harry Zenz had a large church in a West Virginia mining town. Wallace Umstead, the physical instructor, was “doing fine” in
the Y.M.C.A. Professor Bruno Zechlin was dead, poor fellow.

“Whatever became of Horace Carp?” asked Elmer.

“Well, that’s the strangest thing of all. Horace’s gone into the Episcopal Church, like he always said he would.”

“Well, well, zatta fact!”

“Yes-sir, his father died just after he graduated, and he up and turned Episcopalian and took a year in General, and now
they say he’s doing pretty good, and he’s high-church as all get-out.”

“Well, you seem to have a good thing of it here, Eddie. Nice church.”

“Well, it isn’t so big, but they’re awful’ fine people. And everything’s going fine. I haven’t increased the membership
so much, but what I’m trying to do is strengthen the present membership in the faith, and then when I feel each of them is a
center of inspiration, I’ll be ready to start an evangelistic campaign, and you’ll see that ole church boom—yes-sir—just
double overnight. . . . If they only weren’t so slow about paying my salary and the mortgage. . . . Fine solid people,
really saved, but they are just the least little bit tight with the money.”

“If you could see the way my cook-stove’s broken and the sink needs painting,” said Mrs. Fislinger—her chief utterance of
the evening.

Elmer felt choked and imprisoned. He escaped. At the door Eddie held both his hands and begged, “Oh, Elm, I’ll never give
up till I’ve brought you back! I’m going to pray. I’ve seen you under conviction. I know what you can do!”

Fresh air, a defiant drink of rye, loud laughter, taking a train— Elmer enjoyed it after this stuffiness. Already Eddie
had lost such devout fires as he had once shown in the Y.M.C.A: Already he was old, settled down, without conceivable
adventure, waiting for death.

Yet Eddie had said—

Startled, he recalled that he was still a Baptist minister! For all of Trosper’s opposition, he could preach. He felt
with superstitious discomfort, Eddie’s incantation, “I’ll never give up till I’ve brought you back.”

And—just to take Eddie’s church and show what he could do with it! By God HE’D bring those hicks to time and make ’em pay
up!

He flitted across the state to see his mother.

His disgrace at Mizpah had, she said, nearly killed her. With tremulous hope she now heard him promise that maybe when
he’d seen the world and settled down, he might go back into the ministry.

In a religious mood (which fortunately did not prevent his securing some telling credit-information by oiling a
bookkeeper with several drinks) he came to Sautersville, Nebraska, an ugly, enterprising, industrial town of 20,000. And in
that religious mood he noted the placards of a woman evangelist, one Sharon Falconer, a prophetess of whom he had heard.

The clerk in the hotel, the farmers about the implement warehouse, said that Miss Falconer was holding union meetings in
a tent, with the support of most of the Protestant churches in town; they asserted that she was beautiful and eloquent, that
she took a number of assistants with her, that she was “the biggest thing that ever hit this burg,” that she was comparable
to Moody, to Gipsy Smith, to Sam Jones, to J. Wilbur Chapman, to this new baseball evangelist, Billy Sunday.

“That’s nonsense. No woman can preach the gospel,” declared Elmer, as an expert.

But he went, that evening, to Miss Falconer’s meeting.

The tent was enormous; it would seat three thousand people, and another thousand could be packed in standing-room. It was
nearly filled when Elmer arrived and elbowed his majestic way forward. At the front of the tent was an extraordinary
structure, altogether different from the platform-pulpit-American-flag arrangement of the stock evangelist. It was a
pyramidal structure, of white wood with gilded legs, affording three platforms; one for the choir, one higher up for a row
of seated local clergy; and at the top a small platform with a pulpit shaped like a shell and painted like a rainbow.
Swarming over it all were lilies, roses and vines.

“Great snakes! Regular circus lay-out! Just what you’d expect from a fool woman evangelist!” decided Elmer.

The top platform was still unoccupied; presumably it was to set off the charms of Miss Sharon Falconer.

The mixed choir, with their gowns and mortar-boards, chanted “Shall We Gather at the River?” A young man, slight, too
good-looking, too arched of lip, wearing a priest’s waistcoat and collar turned round, read from Acts at a stand on the
second platform. He was an Oxonian, and it was almost the first time that Elmer had heard an Englishman read.

“Huh! Willy-boy, that’s what he is! This outfit won’t get very far. Too much skirts. No punch. No good old-fashioned
gospel to draw the customers,” scoffed Elmer.

A pause. Every one waited, a little uneasy. Their eyes went to the top platform. Elmer gasped. Coming from some refuge
behind the platform, coming slowly, her beautiful arms outstretched to them, appeared a saint. She was young, Sharon
Falconer, surely not thirty, stately, slender and tall; and in her long slim face, her black eyes, her splendor of black
hair, was rapture or boiling passion. The sleeves of her straight white robe, with its ruby girdle, were slashed, and fell
away from her arms as she drew every one to her.

“God!” prayed Elmer Gantry, and that instant his planless life took on plan and resolute purpose. He was going to have
Sharon Falconer.

Her voice was warm, a little husky, desperately alive.

“Oh, my dear people, my dear people, I am not going to preach tonight—we are all so weary of nagging sermons about being
nice and good! I am not going to tell that you’re sinners, for which of us is not a sinner? I am not going to explain the
Scriptures. We are all bored by tired old men explaining the Bible through their noses! No! We are going to find the golden
Scriptures written in our own hearts, we are going to sing together, laugh together, rejoice together like a gathering of
April brooks, rejoice that in us is living the veritable spirit of the Everlasting and Redeeming Christ Jesus!”