Elmer Gantry (38 page)

When he found that he liked the Charity Organization Society and his work in that bleak institution no better than his
work in the church, Frank laughed.

“As Bess said! A consistent malcontent! Well, I AM consistent, anyway. And the relief not to be a preacher any more! Not
to have to act sanctimonious! Not to have men consider you an old woman in trousers! To be able to laugh without watching
its effect!”

Frank was given charge, at the C. O. S., of a lodging-house, a woodyard at which hoboes worked for two hours daily to pay
for lodging and breakfast, and an employment bureau. He knew little about Scientific Charity, so he was shocked by the icy
manner in which his subordinates—the aged virgin at the inquiry desk, the boss of the woodyard, the clerk at the
lodging-house, the young lady who asked the applicants about their religion and vices— treated the shambling unfortunates as
criminals who had deliberately committed the crime of poverty.

They were as efficient and as tender as vermin-exterminators.

In this acid perfection, Frank longed for the mystery that clings to even the dourest or politest tabernacle. He fell in
the way of going often to the huge St. Dominic’s Catholic Church, of which the eloquent Father de Pinna was pastor, with
Father Matthew Smeesby, the new sort of American, state-university-bred priest, as assistant pastor and liaison officer.

St. Dominic’s was, for Zenith, an ancient edifice, and the coal-smoke from the South Zenith factories had aged the gray
stone to a semblance of historic centuries. The interior, with its dim irregularity, its lofty roof, the curious shrines,
the mysterious door at the top of a flight of stone steps, unloosed Frank’s imagination. It touched him to see the people
kneeling at any hour. He had never known a church to which the plain people came for prayer. Despite its dusky magnificence,
they seemed to find in the church their home. And when he saw the gold and crimson of solemn high mass blazing at the end of
the dark aisle, with the crush of people visibly believing in the presence of God, he wondered if he had indeed found the
worship he had fumblingly sought.

He knew that to believe literally in Purgatory and the Immaculate Conception, the Real Presence and the authority of the
hierarchy, was as impossible for him as to believe in Zeus.

“But,” he pondered, “isn’t it possible that the whole thing is so gorgeous a fairy-tale that to criticize it would be
like trying to prove that Jack did not kill the giant? No sane priest could expect a man of some education to think that
saying masses had any effect on souls in Purgatory; they’d expect him to take the whole thing as one takes a symphony. And,
oh, I am lonely for the fellowship of the church!”

He sought a consultation with Father Matthew Smeesby. They had met, as fellow ministers, at many dinners.

The good father sat at a Grand Rapids desk, in a room altogether business-like save for a carved Bavarian cupboard and a
crucifix on the barren plaster wall. Smeesby was a man of forty, a crisper Philip McGarry.

“You were an American university man, weren’t you, Father?” Frank asked.

“Yes. University of Indiana. Played half-back.”

“Then I think I can talk to you. It seems to me that so many of your priests are not merely foreign by birth, Poles and
whatnot, but they look down on American mores and want to mold us to their ideas and ways. But you—Tell me: Would it be
conceivable for an— I won’t say an intelligent, but at least a reasonably well-read man like myself, who finds it quite
impossible to believe one word of your doctrines—”

“Huh!”

“—but who is tremendously impressed by your ritual and the spirit of worship—could such a man be received into the Roman
Catholic Church, honestly, with the understanding that to him your dogmas are nothing but symbols?”

“Most certainly not!”

“Don’t you know any priests who love the Church but don’t literally believe all the doctrines?”

“I do not! I know no such persons! Shallard, you can’t understand the authority and reasonableness of the Church. You’re
not ready to. You think too much of your puerile powers of reasoning. You haven’t enough divine humility to comprehend the
ages of wisdom that have gone to building up this fortress, and you stand outside its walls, one pitifully lonely little
figure, blowing the trumpet of your egotism, and demanding of the sentry, ‘Take me to your commander. I am graciously
inclined to assist him. Only he must understand that I think his granite walls are pasteboard, and I reserve the right to
blow them down when I get tired of them.’ Man, if you were a prostitute or a murderer and came to me saying ‘Can I be
saved?’ I’d cry ‘Yes!’ and give my life to helping you. But you’re obsessed by a worse crime than murder—pride of intellect!
And yet you haven’t such an awfully overpowering intellect to be proud of, and I’m not sure but that’s the worst crime of
all! Good-day!”

He added, as Frank ragingly opened the door, “Go home and pray for simplicity.”

“Go home and pray that I may be made like you? Pray to have your humility and your manners?” said Frank.

It was a fortnight later that for his own satisfaction Frank set down in the note-book which he had always carried for
sermon ideas, which he still carried for the sermons they would never let him preach again, a conclusion:

“The Roman Catholic Church is superior to the militant Protestant Church. It does not compel you to give up your sense of
beauty, your sense of humor, or your pleasant vices. It merely requires you to give up your honesty, your reason, your heart
and soul.”

Frank had been with the Charity Organization Society for three years, and he had become assistant general secretary at
the time of the Dayton evolution trial. It was at this time that the brisker conservative clergymen saw that their influence
and oratory and incomes were threatened by any authentic learning. A few of them were so intelligent as to know that not
only was biology dangerous to their positions, but also history—which gave no very sanctified reputation to the Christian
church; astronomy—which found no convenient Heaven in the skies and snickered politely at the notion of making the sun stand
still in order to win a Jewish border skirmish; psychology—which doubted the superiority of a Baptist preacher fresh from
the farm to trained laboratory researchers; and all the other sciences of the modern university. They saw that a proper
school should teach nothing but bookkeeping, agriculture, geometry, dead languages made deader by leaving out all the
amusing literature, and the Hebrew Bible as interpreted by men superbly trained to ignore contradictions, men technically
called “Fundamentalists.”

This perception the clergy and their most admired laymen expressed in quick action. They formed half a dozen competent
and well-financed organizations to threaten rustic state legislators with political failure and bribe them with unctuous
clerical praise, so that these back-street and backwoods Solons would forbid the teaching in all state-supported schools and
colleges of anything which was not approved by the evangelists.

It worked edifyingly.

To oppose them there were organized a few groups of scholars. One of these organizations asked Frank to speak for them.
He was delighted to feel an audience before him again, and he got leave from the Zenith Charity Organization Society for a
lecture tour.

He came excitedly and proudly to his first assignment, in a roaring modern city in the Southwest. He loved the town;
believed really that he came to it with a “message.” He tasted the Western air greedily, admired the buildings flashing up
where but yesterday had been prairie. He smiled from the hotel ‘bus when he saw a poster which announced that the Reverend
Frank Shallard would speak on “Are the Fundamentalists Witch Hunters?” at Central Labor Hall, auspices of the League for
Free Science.

“Bully! Fighting again! I’ve found that religion I’ve been looking for!”

He peered out for other posters. . . . They were all defaced.

At his hotel was a note, typed, anonymous: “We don’t want you and your hellish atheism here. We can think for ourselves
without any imported ‘liberals.’ If you enjoy life, you’d better be out of this decent Christian city before evening. God
help you if you aren’t! We have enough mercy to give warning, but enough of God’s justice to see you get yours right if you
don’t listen. Blasphemers get what they ask for. We wonder if you would like the feeling of a blacksnake across your lying
face? The Committee.”

Frank had never known physical conflict more violent than boyhood wrestling. His hand shook. He tried to sound defiant
with: “They can’t scare me!”

His telephone, and a voice: “This Shallard? Well this is a brother preacher speaking. Name don’t matter. I just want to
tip you off that you’d better not speak tonight. Some of the boys are pretty rough.”

Then Frank began to know the joy of anger.

The hall of his lecture was half filled when he looked across the ice-water pitcher on the speaker’s table. At the front
were the provincial intellectuals, most of them very eager, most of them dreadfully poor: a Jewish girl librarian with
hungry eyes, a crippled tailor, a spectacled doctor sympathetic to radical disturbances but too good a surgeon to be driven
out of town. There was a waste of empty seats, then, and at the back a group of solid, prosperous, scowling burghers, with a
leonine man who was either an actor, a congressman, or a popular clergyman.

This respectable group grumbled softly, and hissed a little as Frank nervously began.

America, he said, in its laughter at the “monkey trial” at Dayton, did not understand the veritable menace of the
Fundamentalists’ crusade. (“Outrageous!” from the leonine gentleman.) They were mild enough now; they spoke in the name of
virtue; but give them rope, and there would be a new Inquisition, a new hunting of witches. We might live to see men burned
to death for refusing to attend Protestant churches.

Frank quoted the Fundamentalist who asserted that evolutionists were literally murderers, because they killed orthodox
faith, and ought therefore to be lynched; William Jennings Bryan, with his proposal that any American who took a drink
outside the country should be exiled for life.

“That’s how these men speak, with so little power—as yet!” Frank pleaded. “Use your imaginations! Think how they would
rule this nation, and compel the more easy-going half-liberal clergy to work with them, if they had the power!”

There were constant grunts of “That’s a lie!” and “They ought to shut him up!” from the back, and now Frank saw marching
into the hall a dozen tough young men. They stood ready for action, looking expectantly toward the line of prosperous
Christian Citizens.

“And you have here in your own city,” Frank continued, “a minister of the gospel who enjoys bellowing that any one who
disagrees with him is a Judas.”

“That’s enough!” cried some one at the back, and the young toughs galloped down the aisle toward Frank, their eyes hot
with cruelty, teeth like a fighting dog’s, hands working—he could feel them at his neck. They were met and held a moment by
the sympathizers in front. Frank saw the crippled tailor knocked down by a man who stepped on the body as he charged on.

With a curious lassitude more than with any fear, Frank sighed, “Hang it, I’ve got to join the fight and get killed!”

He started down from the platform.

The chairman seized his shoulder. “No! Don’t! You’ll get beaten to death! We need you! Come here—come HERE! This back
door!”

Frank was thrust through a door into a half-lighted alley.

A motor was waiting, and by it two men, one of whom cried, “Right in here, Brother.”

It was a large sedan; it seemed security, life. But as Frank started to climb in he noted the man at the wheel, then
looked closer at the others. The man at the wheel had no lips but only a bitter dry line across his face—the mouth of an
executioner. Of the other two, one was like an unreformed bartender, with curly mustache and a barber’s lock; one was gaunt,
with insane eyes.

“Who are you fellows?” he demanded.

“Shut your damned trap and get t’ hell in there!” shrieked the bartender, pushing Frank into the back of the car, so that
he fell with his head on the cushion.

The insane man scrambled in, and the car was off.

“We told you to get out of town. We gave you your chance. By God, you’ll learn something now, you God damned atheist—and
probably a damn’ socialist or I. W. W. too!” the seeming bartender said. “See this gun?” He stuck it into Frank’s side, most
painfully. “We may decide to let you live if you keep your mouth shut and do what we tell you to—and again we may not.
You’re going to have a nice ride with us! Just think what fun you’re going to have when we get you in the
country—alone—where it’s nice and dark and quiet!”

He placidly lifted his hands and gouged Frank’s cheek with his strong fingernails.

“I won’t stand it!” screamed Frank.

He rose, struggling. He felt the gaunt fanatic’s fingers—just two fingers, demon-strong—close on his neck, dig in with
pain that made him sick. He felt the bartender’s fist smashing his jaw. As he slumped down, limp against the forward seat,
half-fainting, he heard the bartender chuckle:

“That’ll give the blank, blank, blank of a blank some idea of the fun we’ll have watching him squirm bimeby!”

The gaunt one snapped, “The boss said not to cuss.”

“Cuss, hell! I don’t pretend to be any tin angel. I’ve done a lot of tough things. But, by God, when a fellow pretending
to be a minister comes sneaking around trying to make fun of the Christian religion—the only chance us poor devils have got
to become decent again—then, by God, it’s time to show we’ve got some guts and appreciation!”

The pseudo-bartender spoke with the smugly joyous tones of any crusader given a chance to be fiendish for a moral reason,
and placidly raising his leg, he brought his heel down on Frank’s instep.

When the cloud of pain had cleared from his head, Frank sat rigid. . . . What would Bess and the kids do if these men
killed him? . . . Would they beat him much before he died?

The car left the highway, followed a country road and ran along a lane, through what seemed to Frank to be a cornfield.
It stopped by a large tree.

“Get out!” snapped the gaunt man.

Mechanically, his legs limp, Frank staggered out. He looked up at the moon. “It’s the last time I’ll ever see the
moon—see the stars—hear voices. Never again to walk on a fresh morning!”

“What are you going to do?” he said, hating them too much to be afraid.

“Well, dearie,” said the driver, with a dreadful jocosity, “you’re going to take a little walk with us, back here in the
fields a ways.”

“Hell!” said the bartender, “let’s hang him. Here’s a swell tree. Use the tow-rope.”

“No,” from the gaunt man. “Just hurt him enough so he’ll remember, and then he can go back and tell his atheist friends
it ain’t healthy for ’em in real Christian parts. Move, you!”

Frank walked in front of them, ghastly silent. They followed a path through the cornfield to a hollow. The crickets were
noisily cheerful; the moon serene.

“This’ll do,” snarled the gaunt one; then to Frank: “Now get ready to feel good.”

He set his pocket electric torch on a clod of earth. In its light Frank saw him draw from his pocket a coiled black
leather whip, a whip for mules.

“Next time,” said the gaunt one, slowly, “next time you come back here, we’ll kill you. And any other yellow traitor and
stinker and atheist like you. Tell ’em all that! This time we won’t kill you— not quite.”

“Oh, quit talking and let’s get busy!” said the bartender. “All right!”

The bartender caught Frank’s two arms behind, bending them back, almost breaking them, and suddenly with a pain appalling
and unbelievable the whip slashed across Frank’s cheek, cutting it, and instantly it came again—again—in a darkness of
reeling pain.