Elmer Gantry (20 page)

They sat on the hilltop, looking down on noon in the valley, sleepily talking till he roused with: “Why won’t you marry
me?”

“No. Not for years, anyway. I’m too old—thirty-two to your—what is it, twenty-eight or —nine? And I must be free for the
service of Our Lord. . . . You do know I mean that? I am really consecrated, no matter what I may seem to do!”

“Sweet, of course I do! Oh, yes.”

“But not marry. It’s good at times to be just human, but mostly I have to live like a saint. . . . Besides, I do think
men converts come in better if they know I’m not married.”

“Damn it, listen! Do you love me a little?”

“Yes. A little! Oh, I’m as fond of you as I can be of any one except Katie Jonas. Dear child!”

She dropped her head on his shoulder, casually now, in the bee-thrumming orchard aisle, and his arm tightened.

That evening they sang gospel hymns together, to the edification of the Old Family Servants, who began to call him
Doctor.

Not till December did Sharon Falconer take Elmer on as assistant.

When she discharged Cecil Aylston, he said, in a small cold voice, “This is the last time, my dear prophet and peddler,
that I shall ever try to be decent.” But it is known that for several months he tried to conduct a rescue mission in
Buffalo, and if he was examined for insanity, it was because he was seen to sit for hours staring. He was killed in a
gambling den in Juarez, and when she heard of it Sharon was very sorry—she spoke of going to fetch his body, but she was too
busy with holy work.

Elmer joined her at the beginning of the meetings in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He opened the meetings for her, made
announcements, offered prayer, preached when she was too weary, and led the singing when Adelbert Shoop, the musical
director, was indisposed. He developed a dozen sound sermons out of encyclopedias of exegesis, handbooks for evangelists,
and manuals of sermon outlines. He had a powerful discourse, used in the For Men Only service, on the strength and joy of
complete chastity; he told how Jim Leffingwell saw the folly of pleasure at the death-bed of his daughter; and he had an
uplifting address, suitable to all occasions, on Love as the Morning and the Evening Star.

He helped Sharon where Cecil had held her back—or so she said. While she kept her vocabulary of poetic terms, Elmer
managed her in just the soap-box denunciation of sin which had made Cecil shudder. Also he spoke of Cecil as “Osric,” which
she found very funny indeed, and as “Percy,” and “Algernon.” He urged her to tackle the biggest towns, the most polite or
rowdy audiences, and to advertise herself not in the wet-kitten high-church phrases approved by Cecil but in a manner
befitting a circus, an Elks’ convention, or a new messiah.

Under Elmer’s urging she ventured for the first time into the larger cities. She descended on Minneapolis and, with the
support only of such sects as the Full Gospel Assembly, the Nazarenes, the Church of God, and the Wesleyan Methodists, she
risked her savings in hiring an armory and inserting two-column six-inch advertisements of herself.

Minneapolis was quite as enlivened as smaller places by Sharon’s voice and eyes, by her Grecian robes, by her
gold-and-white pyramidal altar, and the profits were gratifying. Thereafter she sandwiched Indianapolis, Rochester, Atlanta,
Seattle, the two Portlands, Pittsburgh, in between smaller cities.

For two years life was a whirlwind to Elmer Gantry.

It was so frantic that he could never remember which town was which. Everything was a blur of hot sermons, writhing
converts, appeals for contributions, trains, denunciation of lazy personal workers, denunciations of Adelbert Shoop for
getting drunk, firing of Adelbert Shoop, taking back of Adelbert Shoop when no other tenor so unctuously pious was to be
found.

Of one duty he was never weary: of standing around and being impressive and very male for the benefit of lady seekers.
How tenderly he would take their hands and moan, “Won’t you hear the dear Savior’s voice calling, Sister?” and all of them,
spinsters with pathetic dried girlishness, misunderstood wives, held fast to his hand and were added to the carefully kept
total of saved souls. Sharon saw to it that he dressed the part—double-breasted dark blue with a dashing tie in winter, and
in summer white suits with white shoes.

But however loudly the skirts rustled about him, so great was Sharon’s intimidating charm that he was true to her.

If he was a dervish figure those two years, she was a shooting star; inspired in her preaching, passionate with him, then
a naughty child who laughed and refused to be serious even at the sermon hour; gallantly generous, then a tight-fisted
virago squabbling over ten cents for stamps. Always, in every high-colored mood, she was his religion and his reason for
being.

When she attacked the larger towns and asked for the support of the richer churches, Sharon had to create several new
methods in the trade of evangelism. The churches were suspicious of women evangelists—women might do very well in visiting
the sick, knitting for the heathen, and giving strawberry festivals, but they couldn’t shout loud enough to scare the devil
out of sinners. Indeed all evangelists, men and women, were under attack. Sound churchmen here and there were asking whether
there was any peculiar spiritual value in frightening people into groveling maniacs. They were publishing statistics which
asserted that not ten per cent of the converts at emotional revival meetings remained church-members. They were even so
commercial as to inquire why a pastor with a salary of two thousand dollars a year—when he got it—should agonize over
helping an evangelist to make ten thousand, forty thousand.

All these doubters had to be answered. Elmer persuaded Sharon to discharge her former advance-agent—he had been a
minister and contributor to the religious press, till the unfortunate affair of the oil stock—and hire a real press-agent,
trained in newspaper work, circus advertising, and real-estate promoting. It was Elmer and the press-agent who worked up the
new technique of risky but impressive defiance.

Where the former advance-man had begged the ministers and wealthy laymen of a town to which Sharon wanted to be invited
to appreciate her spirituality, and had sat nervously about hotels, the new salesman of salvation was brusque:

“I can’t waste my time and the Lord’s time waiting for you people to make up your minds. Sister Falconer is especially
interested in this city because she has been informed that there is a subterranean quickening here such as would simply jam
your churches, with a grand new outpouring of the spirit, provided some real expert like her came to set the fuse alight.
But there are so many other towns begging for her services that if you can’t make up your minds immediately, we’ll have to
accept their appeals and pass you up. Sorry. Can only wait till midnight. Tonight. Reserved my Pullman already.”

There were ever so many ecclesiastical bodies who answered that they didn’t see why he waited even till midnight, but if
they were thus intimidated into signing the contract (an excellent contract, drawn up by a devout Christian Scientist lawyer
named Finkelstein) they were the more prepared to give spiritual and financial support to Sharon’s labors when she did
arrive.

The new press-agent was finally so impressed by the beauties of evangelism, as contrasted with his former circuses and
real estate, that he was himself converted, and sometimes when he was in town with the troupe, he sang in the choir and
spoke to Y.M.C.A. classes in journalism. But even Elmer’s arguments could never get him to give up a sturdy, plodding
devotion to poker.

The contract signed, the advance-man remembered his former newspaper labors, and for a few days became touchingly
friendly with all the reporters in town. There were late parties at his hotel; there was much sending of bell-boys for more
bottles of Wilson and White Horse and Green River. The press-agent admitted that he really did think that Miss Falconer was
the greatest woman since Sarah Bernhardt, and he let the boys have stories, guaranteed held exclusive, of her beauty, the
glories of her family, her miraculous power of fetching sinners or rain by prayer, and the rather vaguely dated time when,
as a young girl, she had been recognized by Dwight Moody as his successor.

South of the Mason and Dixon line her grandfather was merely Mr. Falconer, a bellicose and pious man, but far enough
north he was General Falconer of Ole Virginny—preferably spelled that way—who had been the adviser and solace of General
Robert E. Lee. The press-agent also wrote the posters for the Ministerial Alliance, giving Satan a generous warning as to
what was to happen to him.

So when Sharon and the troupe arrived, the newspapers were eager, the walls and shop-windows were scarlet with placards,
and the town was breathless. Sometimes a thousand people gathered at the station for her arrival.

There were always a few infidels, particularly among the reporters, who had doubted her talents, but when they saw her in
the train vestibule, in a long white coat, when she had stood there a second with her eyes closed, lost in prayer for this
new community, when slowly she held out her white nervous hands in greeting—then the advance-agent’s work was two-thirds
done here and he could go on to whiten new fields for the harvest.

But there was still plenty of discussion before Sharon was rid of the forces of selfishness and able to get down to the
job of spreading light.

Local committees were always stubborn, local committees were always jealous, local committees were always lazy, and local
committees were always told these facts, with vigor. The heat of the arguments was money.

Sharon was one of the first evangelists to depend for all her profit not on a share of the contributions nor on a weekly
offering, but on one night devoted entirely to a voluntary “thank offering,” for her and her crew alone. It sounded
unselfish and it brought in more; every devotee saved up for that occasion; and it proved easier to get one fifty-dollar
donation than a dozen of a dollar each. But to work up this lone offering to suitably thankful proportions, a great deal of
loving and efficient preparation was needed—reminders given by the chief pastors, bankers, and other holy persons of the
town, the distribution of envelopes over which devotees were supposed to brood for the whole six weeks of the meetings, and
innumerable newspaper paragraphs about the self-sacrifice and heavy expenses of the evangelists.

It was over these innocent necessary precautions that the local committees always showed their meanness. They liked
giving over only one contribution to the evangelist, but they wanted nothing said about it till they themselves had been
taken care of—till the rent of the hall or the cost of building a tabernacle, the heat, the lights, the advertising, and
other expenses had been paid.

Sharon would meet the committee—a score of clergymen, a score of their most respectable deacons, a few angular Sunday
School superintendents, a few disapproving wives—in a church parlor, and for the occasion she always wore the gray suit and
an air of metropolitan firmness, and swung a pair of pince-nez with lenses made of window-glass. While in familiar words the
local chairman was explaining to her that their expenses were heavy, she would smile as though she knew something they could
not guess, then let fly at them breathlessly:

“I’m afraid there is some error here! I wonder if you are quite in the mood to forget all material things and really
throw yourselves into the self-abnegating glory of a hot campaign for souls? I know all you have to say—as a matter of fact,
you’ve forgotten to mention your expenses for watchmen, extra hymn books, and hiring camp-chairs!

“But you haven’t the experience to appreciate MY expenses! I have to maintain almost as great a staff—not only workers
and musicians but all my other representatives, whom you never see—as though I had a factory. Besides them, I have my
charities. There is, for example, the Old Ladies’ Home, which I keep up entirely—oh, I shan’t say anything about it, but if
you could see those poor aged women turning to me with such anxious faces—!”

(Where that Old Ladies’ Home was, Elmer never learned.)

“We come here without any guarantee, we depend wholly upon the free-will offering of the last day; and I’m afraid you’re
going to stress the local expenses so that people will not feel like giving on the last day even enough to pay the salaries
of my assistants. I’m taking—if it were not that I abominate the pitiful and character-destroying vice of gambling, I’d say
that I’m taking such a terrible gamble that it frightens me! But there it is, and—”

While she was talking, Sharon was sizing up this new assortment of clergy: the cranks, the testy male old maids, the
advertising and pushing demagogues, the commonplace pulpit-job-holders, the straddling young liberals; the real mystics, the
kindly fathers of their flocks, the lovers of righteousness. She had picked out as her advocate the most sympathetic, and
she launched her peroration straight at him:

“Do you want to ruin me, so that never again shall I be able to carry the message, to carry salvation, to the desperate
souls who are everywhere waiting for me, crying for my help? Is that your purpose—you, the elect, the people chosen to help
me in the service of the dear Lord Jesus himself? Is that your purpose? Is it? Is it?”

She began sobbing, which was Elmer’s cue to jump up and have a wonderful idea.

He knew, did Elmer, that the dear brethren and sisters had no such purpose. They just wanted to be practical. Well, why
wouldn’t it be a good notion for the committee to go to the well-to-do church members and explain the unparalleled
situation; tell them that this was the Lord’s work, and that aside from the unquestioned spiritual benefits, the revival
would do so much good that crime would cease, and taxes thus be lessened; that workmen would turn from agitation to higher
things, and work more loyally at the same wages. If they got enough pledges from the rich for current expenses, those
expenses would not have to be stressed at the meetings, and people could properly be coaxed to save up for the final “thank
offering”; not have to be nagged to give more than small coins at the nightly collections.

There were other annoyances to discuss with the local committee. Why, Elmer would demand, hadn’t they provided enough
dressing-rooms in the tabernacle? Sister Falconer needed privacy. Sometimes just before the meeting she and he had to have
important conferences. Why hadn’t they provided more volunteer ushers? He must have them at once, to train them, for it was
the ushers, when properly coached, who would ease struggling souls up to the altar for the skilled finishing touches by the
experts.

Had they planned to invite big delegations from the local institutions—from Smith Brothers’ Catsup Factory, from the
car-shops, from the packing house? Oh, yes, they must plan to stir up these institutions; an evening would be dedicated to
each of them, the representatives would be seated together, and they’d have such a happy time singing their favorite
hymns.

By this time, a little dazed, the local committee were granting everything; and they looked almost convinced when Sharon
wound up with a glad ringing:

“All of you must look forward, and joyfully, to a sacrifice of time and money in these meetings. We have come here at a
great sacrifice, and we are here only to help you.”