Elmer Gantry (36 page)

Elmer’s metaphysical lecture, entitled “Whoa Up, Youth!” with its counsel about abstinence, chastity, industry, and
honesty, its heaven-vaulting poetic passage about Love (the only bow on life’s dark cloud, the morning and the evening
star), and its anecdote of his fight to save a college-mate named Jim from drink and atheism, became one of the classics
among Chautauqua masterpieces.

And Elmer better than any one else among the Talent (except perhaps the gentleman who played national anthems on water
glasses, a Lettish gentleman innocent of English) side-stepped on the question of the K. K. K.

The new Ku Klux Klan, an organization of the fathers, younger brothers, and employees of the men who had succeeded and
became Rotarians, had just become a political difficulty. Many of the most worthy Methodist and Baptist clergymen supported
it and were supported by it; and personally Elmer admired its principle—to keep all foreigners, Jews, Catholics, and negroes
in their place, which was no place at all, and let the country be led by native Protestants, like Elmer Gantry.

But he perceived that in the cities there were prominent people, nice people, rich people, even among the Methodists and
Baptists, who felt that a man could be a Jew and still an American citizen. It seemed to him more truly American, also a lot
safer, to avoid the problem. So everywhere he took a message of reconciliation to the effect:

“Regarding religious, political, and social organizations, I defend the right of every man in our free America to
organize with his fellows when and as he pleases, for any purpose he pleases, but I also defend the right of any other free
American citizen to demand that such an organization shall not dictate his mode of thought or, so long as it be moral, his
mode of conduct.”

That pleased both the K. K. K. and the opponents of the K. K. K., and everybody admired Elmer’s powers of thought.

He came with a boom and a flash to the town of Blackfoot Creek, Indiana, and there the local committee permitted the
Methodist minister, one Andrew Pengilly, to entertain his renowned brother priest.

Always a little lonely, lost in the ceaseless unfolding of his mysticism, old Andrew Pengilly had been the lonelier since
Frank Shallard had left him.

When he heard that the Reverend Elmer Gantry was coming, Mr. Pengilly murmured to the local committee that it would be a
pleasure to put up Mr. Gantry and save him from the scurfy village hotel.

He had read of Mr. Gantry as an impressive orator, a courageous fighter against Sin. Mr. Pengilly sighed. Himself,
somehow, he had never been able to find so very much Sin about. His fault. A silly old dreamer. He rejoiced that he, the
mousy village curé, was about to have here, glorifying his cottage, a St. Michael in dazzling armor.

After the evening Chautauqua Elmer sat in Mr. Pengilly’s hovel, and he was graciously condescending.

“You say, Brother Pengilly, that you’ve heard of our work at Wellspring? But do we get so near the hearts of the weak and
unfortunate as you here? Oh, no; sometimes I think that my first pastorate, in a town smaller than this, was in many ways
more blessed than our tremendous to-do in the great city. And what IS accomplished there is no credit to me. I have such
splendid, such touchingly loyal assistants—Mr. Webster, the assistant pastor— such a consecrated worker, and yet right on
the job—and Mr. Wink, and Miss Weezeger, the deaconess, and DEAR Miss Bundle, the secretary—SUCH a faithful soul, SO
industrious. Oh, yes, I am singularly blessed! But, uh, but—Given these people, who really do the work, we’ve been able to
put over some pretty good things— with God’s leading. Why, say, we’ve started the only class in show-window dressing in any
church in the United States—and I should suppose England and France! We’ve already seen the most wonderful results, not only
in raising the salary of several of the fine young men in our church, but in increasing business throughout the city and
improving the appearance of show-windows, and you know how much that adds to the beauty of the down-town streets! And the
crowds do seem to be increasing steadily. We had over eleven hundred present on my last Sunday evening in Zenith, and that
in summer! And during the season we often have nearly eighteen hundred, in an auditorium that’s only supposed to seat
sixteen hundred! And with all modesty—it’s not my doing but the methods we’re working up—I think I may say that every man,
woman, and child goes away happy and yet with a message to sustain ’em through the week. You see—oh, of course I give ’em
the straight old-time gospel in my sermon—I’m not the least bit afraid of talking right up to ’em and reminding them of the
awful consequences of sin and ignorance and spiritual sloth. Yes, sir! No blinking the horrors of the old-time proven Hell,
not in any church I’M running! But also we make ’em get together, and their pastor is just one of their own chums, and we
sing cheerful, comforting songs, and do they like it? Say! It shows up in the collections!”

“Mr. Gantry,” said Andrew Pengilly, “why don’t you believe in God?”

His friendship with Dr. Philip McGarry of the Arbor Church was all, Frank Shallard felt, that kept him in the church. As
to his round little wife Bess and the three respectable children, he had for them less passion than compassion, and he
could, he supposed, make enough money somehow to care for them.

McGarry was not an extraordinary scholar, not especially eloquent, not remarkably virtuous, but in him there was kindness
along with robust humor, a yearning for justice steeled by common sense, and just that quality of authentic good-fellowship
which the Professional Good Fellows of Zenith, whether preachers or shoe-salesmen, blasphemed against by shouting and
guffawing and back— slapping. Women trusted in his strength and his honor; children were bold with him; men disclosed to him
their veiled sorrows; and he was more nimble to help them than to be shocked.

Frank worshiped him.

Himself a bachelor, McGarry had become an intimate of Frank’s house. He knew where the ice-pick was kept, and where the
thermos bottles for picnics; he was as likely as Frank to wash up after late suppers; and if he called and the elder
Shallards were not in, he slipped up-stairs and was found there scandalously keeping the children awake by stories of his
hunting in Montana and Arizona and Saskatchewan.

It was thus when Frank and Bess came home from prayer-meeting one evening. Philip McGarry’s own prayer-meetings were
brief. A good many people said they were as artificial a form of religious bait as Elmer Gantry’s Lively Sunday Evenings,
but if McGarry did also have the habit of making people sing “Smile, Smile, Smile” on all public events except possibly
funerals, at least he was not so insistent about their shouting it.

They drifted down to the parsonage living-room, which Bess had made gay with chintzes, Frank studious with portentous
books of sociology. Frank sat deep in a chair smoking a pipe—he could never quite get over looking like a youngish college
professor who smokes to show what a manly fellow he is. McGarry wandered about the room. He had a way of pointing arguments
by shaking objects of furniture—pokers, vases, books, lamps—which was as dangerous as it looked.

“Oh, I was rotten at prayer-meeting tonight,” Frank grumbled. “Darn it, I can’t seem to go on being interested in the
fact that old Mrs. Besom finds God such a comfort in her trials. Mrs. Besom’s daughter-inlaw doesn’t find Mrs. Besom any
comfort in HER trials, let me tell you! And yet I don’t see how I can say to her, after she’s been fluttering around among
the angels and advertising how dead certain she is that Jesus loves her—I haven’t quite the nerve to say, ‘Sister, you
tight-fisted, poison-tongued, old hellcat—’”

“Why, Frank!” from Bess, in placid piety.

“’—you go home and forget your popularity in Heaven and ask your son and his wife to forgive you for trying to make them
your kind of saint, with acidity of the spiritual stomach!’”

“Why, FRANK!”

“Let him rave, Bess,” said McGarry. “If a preacher didn’t cuss his congregation out once in a while, nobody but St. John
would ever’ve lasted—and I’ll bet he wasn’t very good at weekly services and parish visiting!”

“AND,” went on Frank, “tomorrow I’ve got a funeral. That Henry Semp. Weighed two hundred and eighty pounds from the neck
down and three ounces from the neck up. Perfectly good Christian citizen who believed that Warren G. Harding was the
greatest man since George Washington. I’m sure he never beat his wife. Worthy communicant. But when his wife came to hire
me, she wept like the dickens when she talked about Henry’s death, but I noticed from the window that when she went off down
the street she looked particularly cheerful. Yes, Henry was a bulwark of the nation; not to be sneered at by highbrows. And
I’m dead certain, from something she said, that every year they’ve jipped the Government out of every cent they could on
their income tax. And tomorrow I’m supposed to stand up there and tell his friends what a moral example and intellectual
Titan he was, and how the poor little woman is simply broken by sorrow. Well, cheer up! From what I know of her, she’ll be
married again within six months, and if I do a good job of priesting tomorrow, maybe I’ll get the fee! Oh, Lord, Phil, what
a job, what a lying compromising job, this being a minister!”

It was their hundredth argument over the question.

McGarry waved a pillow, discarded it for Bess’ purse, while she tried not to look alarmed, and shouted, “It is not! As I
heard a big New York preacher say one day: he knew how imperfect the ministry is, and how many second-raters get into it,
and yet if he had a thousand lives, he’d want to be a minister of the gospel, to be a man showing the philosophy of Jesus to
mankind, in every one of ’em. And the church universal, no matter what its failings, is still the only institution in which
we can work together to hand on that gospel. Maybe it’s your fault, not the church’s, young Frank, if you’re so scared of
your people that you lie at funerals! I don’t, by Jiminy!”

“You do, by Jiminy, my dear Phil! You don’t know it. No, what you do is, you hypnotize yourself until you’re convinced
that every dear departed was a model of some virtue, and then you rhapsodize about that.”

“Well, probably he was!”

“Of course. Probably your burglar was a model of courage, and your gambler a model of kindness to everybody except the
people he robbed, but I don’t like being hired to praise burglars and gamblers and respectable loan-sharks and food-hounds
like Henry Semp, and encourage youngsters to accept their standards, and so keep on perpetuating this barbarous civilization
for which we preachers are as responsible as the lawyers or the politicians or the soldiers or even the school-masters. No,
sir! Oh, I AM going to get out of the church! Think of it! A PREACHER, getting religion, getting saved, getting honest,
getting out! Then I’d know the joys of sanctification that you Methodys talk about!”

“Oh, you make me tired!” Bess complained, not very aggressively. She looked, at forty-one, like a plump and amiable girl
of twenty. “Honestly, Phil, I do wish you could show Frank where he’s wrong. I can’t, and I’ve been trying these fifteen
years.”

“You have, my lamb!”

“Honestly, Phil, can’t you make him see it?” said Bess. “He’s—of course I do adore him, but of all the cry-babies I ever
met—He’s the worst of all my children! He talks about going into charity work, about getting a job with a labor bank or a
labor paper, about lecturing, about trying to write. Can’t you make him see that he’d be just as discontented whatever he
did? I’ll bet you the labor leaders and radical agitators and the Charity Organization Society people aren’t perfect little
angels any more than preachers are!”

“Heavens, I don’t expect ’em to be! I don’t expect to be content,” Frank protested. “And isn’t it a good thing to have a
few people who are always yammering? Never get anywhere without. What a joke that a minister, who’s supposed to have such
divine authority that he can threaten people with hell, is also supposed to be such an office-boy that he can be cussed out
and fired if he dares to criticize capitalists or his fellow ministers! Anyway—Dear Bess, it’s rotten on you. I’d LIKE to be
a contented sort, I’d like to ‘succeed,’ to be satisfied with being half-honest. But I can’t. . . . You see, Phil, I was
brought up to believe the Christian God wasn’t a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator and advocate of the
whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me—I actually took my teachers seriously!”

“Oh, tut, tut, Frank; trouble with you is,” Philip McGarry yawned, “trouble with YOU is, you like arguing more than you
do patiently working out the spiritual problems of some poor, dumb, infinitely piteous human being that comes to you for
help, and that doesn’t care a hoot whether you advocate Zoroastrianism or Seventh-day Adventism, so long as he feels that
you love him and that you can bring him strength from a power higher than himself. I know that if you could lose your
intellectual pride, if you could forget that you have to make a new world, better’n the Creator’s, right away tonight—you
and Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells and H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis (Lord, how that book of Lewis’, ‘Main Street,’ did
bore me, as much of it as I read; it just rambled on forever, and all he could see was that some of the Gopher Prairie hicks
didn’t go to literary teas quite as often as he does!—that was all he could see among those splendid heroic pioneers)! Well,
as I was saying, if instead of starting in where your congregation has left off, because they never had your chance, you
could draw them along with you—”

“I try to! And let me tell you, young fellow, I’ve got a few of ’em far enough along so they’re having the sense to leave
me and my evangelical church and go off to the Unitarians or stay away from church altogether—thus, Bess darling, depriving
my wife and babes of a few more pennies! But seriously, Phil—”

“A man always says ‘But seriously’ when he feels the previous arguments haven’t been so good yet!”

“Maybe. But anyway, what I mean to say is: Of course my liberalism is all foolishness! Do you know why my people stand
for it? They’re not enough interested to realize what I’m saying! If I had a successor who was a fundamentalist, they’d like
him just as well or better, and they’d go back a-whooping to the sacred hell-fire that I’ve coaxed ’em out of. They don’t
believe I mean it when I take a shot at the fear of eternal punishment, and the whole magic and taboo system of worshiping
the Bible and the ministry, and all the other skull-decorated vestiges of horror there are in so-called Christianity! They
don’t know it! Partly it’s because they’ve been trained not to believe anything much they hear in sermons. But also it’s my
fault. I’m not aggressive. I ought to jump around like a lunatic or a popular evangelist, and shout, ‘D’ you understand?
When I say that most of your religious opinions are bunk, why, what I mean is, they’re BUNK!’ I’ve never been violently
enough in earnest to be beaten for the sake of the Lord our God! . . . Not yet!”

“Hah, there I’ve got you, Frank! Tickles me to see you try to be the village atheist! ‘For the sake of the Lord’ you just
said. And how often I’ve heard you say at parting ‘God bless you’—and you meant it! Oh, no, you don’t believe in Christ! Not
any more than the Pope at Rome!”

“I suppose that if I said ‘God damn you,’ that would also prove that I was a devout Christian! Oh, Phil, I can’t
understand how a man as honest as you, as really fond of helping people—and of tolerating them!—can stand being classed with
a lot of your fellow preachers and not even kick about it! Think of your going on enduring being a fellow Methodist preacher
right in the same town with Elmer Gantry and not standing up in ministers’ meeting and saying, ‘Either he gets out or I
do!’”

“I know! You idiot, don’t you suppose those of us that are halfway decent suffer from being classed with Gantry, and that
we hate him more than you do? But even if Elmer is rather on the swine side, what of it? Would you condemn a fine aspiring
institution, full of broad-gauged, earnest fellows, because one of them was a wash-out?”

“One? Just one? I’ll admit there aren’t many, not VERY many, hogs like Gantry in your church, or any other, but let me
give my loving fraternal opinions of a few others of your splendid Methodist fellows! Bishop Toomis is a gas-bag. Chester
Brown, with his candles and chanting, he’s merely an Episcopalian who’d go over to the Episcopal church if he weren’t afraid
he’d lose too much salary in starting again—just as a good share of the Anglo–Catholic Episcopalians are merely Catholics
who’d go over to Rome if they weren’t afraid of losing social caste. Otto Hickenlooper, with his institutions—the rich are
so moved by his charities that they hand him money and Otto gets praised for spending that money. Fine vicious circle. And
think of some poor young idiot studying art, wasting his time and twisting his ideas, at Otto’s strictly moral art class,
where the teacher is chosen more for his opinions on the sacraments than for his knowledge of composition.”

“But, Frank, I’ve SAID all—”

“And the sound, the scholarly, the well-balanced Dr. Mahlon Potts! Oh, he’s a perfectly good man, and not a fanatic.
Doesn’t believe that evolution is a fiendish doctrine. The only trouble with him— as with most famous preachers—is that he
hasn’t the slightest notion what human beings are like. He’s insulated; has been ever since he became a preacher. He goes to
the death-beds of prostitutes (but not very often, I’ll bet!) but he can’t understand that perfectly decent husbands and
wives often can’t get along because of sexual incompatibility.

“Potts lives in a library; he gets his idea of human motives out of George Eliot and Margaret Deland, and his ideas of
economics out of editorials in the Advocate, and his idea as to what he really is accomplishing out of the flattery of his
Ladies’ Aid! He’s a much worse criminal than Gantry! I imagine Elmer has some desire to be a good fellow and share his swag,
but Dr. Potts wants to make over an entire world of living, bleeding, sweating, loving, fighting human beings into the
likeness of Dr. Potts—of Dr. Potts taking his afternoon nap and snoring under a shelf of books about the doctrines of the
Ante–Nicene Fathers!”

“Golly, you simply love us! And I suppose you think I admire all these fellows! Why, they regard me as a heretic, from
the bishop down,” said Philip McGarry.

“And yet you stay with them!”

“Any other church better?”

“Oh, no. Don’t think I give all my love to the Methodists. I take them only because they’re your particular breed. My own
Congregationalists, the Baptists who taught me that immersion is more important than social justice, the Presbyterians, the
Campbellites, the whole lot—oh, I love ’em all about equally!”

“And what about yourself? What about me?”

“You know what I think of myself—a man too feeble to stand up and risk being called a crank or a vile atheist! And about
you, my young liberal friend, I was just saving you to the last in my exhibit of Methodist parsons! You’re the worst of the
lot!”