CHAPTER XXIV
itwas during his inquiry about clerical allies and rivals—they were the same thing—that Elmer learned that two of his classmates at Mizpah Seminary were stationed in Zenith.
Wallace Umstead, the Mizpah student-instructor in gymnastics, was now general secretary of the Zenith Y. M. C. A.
“He’s a boob. We can pass him up,” Elmer decided. “Husky but no finesse and culture. No. That’s wrong. Preacher can get a lot of publicity speaking at the Y., and get the fellows to join his church.”
So he called on Mr. Umstead, and that was a hearty and touching meeting between classmates, two strong men come face to face, two fellow manly Christians.
But Elmer was not pleased to learn of the presence of the second classmate, Frank Shallard. He angrily recalled: “Sure—the fellow that high-hatted me and sneaked around and tried to spy on me when I was helping him learn the game at Schoenheim.”
He was glad to hear that Frank was in disgrace with the sounder and saner clergy of Zenith. He had left the Baptist Church; it was said that he had acted in a low manner as a common soldier in the Great War; and he had gone as pastor to a Congregational Church in Zenith—not a God-fearing, wealthy Congregational Church, like that of Dr. G. Prosper Edwards, but one that was suspected of being as shaky and cowardly and misleading as any Unitarian fold.
Elmer remembered that he still owed Frank the hundred dollars which he had borrowed to reach Zenith for the last of his Prosperity lectures. He was furious to remember it. He couldn’t pay it, not now, with a motor-car just bought and only half paid for! But was it safe to make an enemy of this crank Shallard, who might go around shooting his mouth off and telling a lot of stories—not more’n half of ’em true?
He groaned with martyrdom, made out a check for a hundred—it was one-half of his present bank-balance—and sent it to Frank with a note explaining that for years he had yearned to return this money, but he had lost Frank’s address. Also, he would certainly call on his dear classmate just as soon as he got time.
“And that’ll be about sixteen years after the Day of Judgment,” he snorted.
Not all the tenderness, all the serene uprightness, all the mystic visions of Andrew Pengilly, that village saint, had been able to keep Frank Shallard satisfied with the Baptist ministry after his association with the questioning rabbi and the Unitarian minister at Eureka. These liberals proved admirably the assertion of the Baptist fundamentalists that to tamper with biology and ethnology was to lose one’s Baptist faith, wherefore State University education should be confined to algebra, agriculture, and Bible study.
Early in 1917, when it was a question as to whether he would leave his Baptist church or be kicked out, Frank was caught by the drama of war—caught, in his wavering, by what seemed strength—and he resigned, for all of Bess’ bewildered protests; he sent her and the children back to her father, and enlisted as a private soldier.
Chaplain? No! He wanted, for the first time, to be normal and uninsulated.
Through the war he was kept as a clerk in camp in America. He was industrious, quick, accurate, obedient; he rose to a sergeancy and learned to smoke; he loyally brought his captain home whenever he was drunk; and he read half a hundred volumes of science.
And all the time he hated it.
He hated the indignity of being herded with other men, no longer a person of leisure and dignity and command, whose idiosyncrasies were important to himself and to other people, but a cog, to be hammered brusquely the moment it made any rattle of individuality. He hated the seeming planlessness of the whole establishment. If this was a war to end war, he heard nothing of it from any of his fellow soldiers or his officers.
But he learned to be easy and common with common men. He learned not even to hear cursing. He learned to like large males more given to tobacco-chewing than to bathing, and innocent of all words longer than “hell.” He found himself so devoted to the virtues of these common people that he wanted “to do something for them”—and in bewildered reflection he could think of no other way of “doing something for them” than to go on preaching.
But not among the Baptists, with their cast-iron minds.
Nor yet could he quite go over to the Unitarians. He still revered Jesus of Nazareth as the one path to justice and kindness, and he still—finding even as in childhood a magic in the stories of shepherds keeping watch by night, of the glorified mother beside the babe in the manger—he still had an unreasoned feeling that Jesus was of more than human birth, and veritably the Christ.
It seemed to him that the Congregationalists were the freest among the more or less trinitarian denominations. Each Congregational church made its own law. The Baptists were supposed to, but they were ruled by a grim general opinion.
After the war he talked to the state superintendent of Congregational churches of Winnemac. Frank wanted a free church, and a poor church, but not poor because it was timid and lifeless.
They would, said the superintendent, be glad to welcome him among the Congregationalists, and there was available just the flock Frank wanted: the Dorchester Church, on the edge of Zenith. The parishioners were small shopkeepers and factory foremen and skilled workmen and railwaymen, with a few stray music-teachers and insurance agents. They were mostly poor; and they had the reputation of really wanting the truth from the pulpit.
When Elmer arrived, Frank had been at the Dorchester Church for two years, and he had been nearly happy.
He found that the grander among his fellow Congregational pastors—such as G. Prosper Edwards, with his down-town plush-lined cathedral—could be shocked almost as readily as the Baptists by a suggestion that we didn’t really quiteknowabout the virgin birth. He found that the worthy butchers and haberdashers of his congregation did not radiate joy at a defense of Bolshevik Russia. He found that he was still not at all certain that he was doing any good, aside from providing the drug of religious hope to timorous folk frightened of hell-fire and afraid to walk alone.
But to be reasonably free, to have, after army life, the fleecy comfort of a home with jolly Bess and the children, this was oasis, and for three years Frank halted in his fumbling for honesty.
Even more than Bess, the friendship of Dr. Philip McGarry, of the Arbor Methodist Church, kept Frank in the ministry.
McGarry was three or four years younger than Frank, but in his sturdy cheerfulness he seemed more mature. Frank had met him at the Ministerial Alliance’s monthly meeting, and they had liked in each other a certain disdainful honesty. McGarry was not to be shocked by what biology did to Genesis, by the suggestion that certain Christian rites had been stolen from Mithraic cults, by Freudianism, by any social heresies, yet McGarry loved the church, as a comradely gathering of people alike hungry for something richer than daily selfishness, and this love he passed on to Frank.
But Frank still resented it that, as a parson, he was considered not quite virile; that even clever people felt they must treat him with a special manner; that he was barred from knowing the real thoughts and sharing the real desires of normal humanity.
And when he received Elmer’s note of greeting he groaned, “Oh, Lord, I wonder if people ever class me with a fellow like Gantry?”
He suggested to Bess, after a spirited account of Elmer’s eminent qualities for spiritual and amorous leadership, “I feel like sending his check back to him.”
“Let’s see it,” said Bess and, placing the check in her stocking, she observed derisively, “There’s a new suit for Michael, and a lovely dinner for you and me, and a new lip-stick, and money in the bank. Cheers! I adore you, Reverend Shallard, I worship you, I adhere to you in all Christian fidelity, but let me tell you, my lad, it wouldn’t hurt you one bit if you had some of Elmer’s fast technique in love-making!”
CHAPTER XXV
elmerhad, even in Zenith, to meet plenty of solemn and whiskery persons whose only pleasure aside from not doing agreeable things was keeping others from doing them. But the general bleakness of his sect was changing, and he found in Wellspring Church a Young Married Set who were nearly as cheerful as though they did not belong to a church.
This Young Married Set, though it was in good odor, though the wives taught Sunday School and the husbands elegantly passed collection plates, swallowed the Discipline with such friendly ease as a Catholic priest uses toward the latest bleeding Madonna. They lived, largely, in the new apartment-houses which were creeping into Old Town. They were not rich, but they had Fords and phonographs and gin. They danced, and they were willing to dance even in the presence of the Pastor.
They smelled in Elmer one of them, and though Cleo’s presence stiffened them into uncomfortable propriety, when he dropped in on them alone they shouted, “Come on, Reverend, I bet you can shake a hoof as good as anybody! The wife says she’s gotta dance with you! Gotta get acquainted with these Sins of the World if you’re going to make snappy sermons!”
He agreed, and he did dance, with a pretty appearance of being shocked. He was light-footed still, for all his weight, and there was electricity in his grasp as his hands curled about his partner’s waist.
“Oh, my, Reverend, if you hadn’t been a preacher you’d have been some dancing-man!” the women fluttered, and for all his caution he could not keep from looking into their fascinated eyes, noting the flutter of their bosoms, and murmuring, “Better remember I’m human, honey! If I did cut loose—Zowie!”
And they admired him for it.
Once, when rather hungrily he sniffed at the odors of alcohol and tobacco, the host giggled, “Say, I hope you don’t smell anything on my breath, Reverend—be fierce if you thought a good Methodist like me could ever throw in a shot of liquor!”
“It’s not my business to smell anything except on Sundays,” said Elmer amiably, and, “Come on now, Sister Gilson, let’s try and fox-trot again. My gracious, you talk about me smelling for liquor! Think of what would happen if Brother Apfelmus knew his dear Pastor was slipping in a little dance! Mustn’t tell on me, folks!”
“You bet we won’t!” they said, and not even the elderly pietists on whom he called most often became louder adherents of the Reverend Elmer Gantry, better advertisers of his sermons, than these blades of the Young Married Set.
He acquired a habit of going to their parties. He was hungry for brisk companionship, and it was altogether depressing now to be with Cleo. She could never learn, not after ten efforts a day, that she could not keep him from saying “Damn!” by looking hurt and murmuring, “Oh, Elmer, how can you?”
He told her, regarding the parties, that he was going out to call on parishioners. And he was not altogether lying. His ambition was more to him now than any exalted dissipation, and however often he yearned for the mechanical pianos and the girls in pink kimonos of whom he so lickerishly preached, he violently kept away from them.
But the jolly wives of the Young Married Set—— Particularly this Mrs. Gilson, Beryl Gilson, a girl of twenty-five, born for cuddling. She had a bleached and whining husband, who was always quarreling with her in a weakly violent sputtering; and she was obviously taken by Elmer’s confident strength. He sat by her in “cozy-corners,” and his arm was tense. But he won glory by keeping from embracing her. Also, he wasn’t so sure that he could win her. She was flighty, fond of triumphs, but cautious, a city girl used to many suitors. And if she did prove kind—— She was a member of his church, and she was talkative. She might go around hinting.
After these meditations he would flee to the hospitality of T. J. Rigg, in whose cheerfully sloven house he could relax safely, from whom he could get the facts about the private business careers of his more philanthropic contributors. But all the time the attraction of Beryl Gilson, the vision of her dove-smooth shoulders, was churning him to insanity.
He had not noticed them during that Sunday morning sermon in late autumn, not noticed them among the admirers who came up afterward to shake hands. Then he startled and croaked, so that the current hand-shaker thought he was ill.
Elmer had seen, loitering behind the others, his one-time forced fiancée, Lulu Bains of Schoenheim, and her lanky, rugged, vengeful cousin, Floyd Naylor.
They strayed up only when all the others were gone, when the affable ushers had stopped pouncing on victims and pump-handling them and patting their arms, as all ushers always do after all church services. Elmer wished the ushers were staying, to protect him, but he was more afraid of scandal than of violence.
He braced himself, feeling the great muscles surge along his back, then took quick decision and dashed toward Lulu and Floyd, yammering, “Well, well, well, well, well, well—”
Floyd shambled up, not at all unfriendly, and shook hands powerfully. “Lulu and I just heard you were in town—don’t go to church much, I guess, so we didn’t know. We’re married!”
While he shook hands with Lulu, much more tenderly, Elmer gave his benign blessing with “Well, well! Mighty glad to hear it.”
“Yep, been married—gosh, must be fourteen years now—got married just after we last seen you at Schoenheim.”
By divine inspiration Elmer was led to look as though he were wounded clear to the heart at the revived memory of that unfortunate last seeing. He folded his hands in front of his beautiful morning coat, and looked noble, slightly milky and melancholy of eye. . . . But he was not milky. He was staring hard enough. He saw that though Floyd was still as clumsily uncouth as ever, Lulu—she must be thirty-three or -four now—had taken on the city. She wore a simple, almost smart hat, a good tweed top-coat, and she was really pretty. Her eyes were ingratiatingly soft, very inviting; she still smiled with a desire to be friendly to every one. Inevitably, she had grown plump, but she had not yet overdone it, and her white little paw was veritably that of a kitten.
All this Elmer noted, while he looked injured but forgiving and while Floyd stammered:
“You see, Reverend, I guess you thought we played you a pretty dirty trick that night on the picnic at Dad Bains’, when you came back and I was kind of hugging Lulu.”
“Yes, Floyd, I was pretty hurt, but—— Let’s forget and forgive!”
“No, but listen, Reverend! Golly, ’twas hard for me to come and explain to you, but now I’ve got going—— Lulu and me, we weren’t making love. No, sir! She was just feeling blue, and I was trying to cheer her up. Honest! Then when you got sore and skipped off, Pa Bains, he was so doggone mad—got out his shotgun and cussed and raised the old Ned, yes, sir, he simply raised Cain, and he wouldn’t give me no chance to explain. Said I had to marry Lu. ‘Well,’ I says, ‘if you thinkthat’sany hardship—’ ”
Floyd stopped to chuckle. Elmer was conscious that Lulu was studying him, in awe, in admiration, in a palpitating resurgence of affection.
“ ‘If you think that’s any hardship,’ I says, ‘let me tell you right now, Uncle,’ I says, ‘I been crazy to marry Lu ever since she was so high. Well, there was a lot of argument. Dad Bains says first we had to go in town and explain everything to you. But you was gone away, next morning, and what with one thing and another—well, here we are! And doing pretty good. I own a garage out here on the edge of town, and we got a nice flat, and everything going fine. But Lule and I kind of felt maybe we ought to come around and explain, when we heard you were here. And got two fine kids, both boys!”
“Honestly, we never meant—we didn’t!” begged Lulu.
Elmer condescended, “Of course, I understand perfectly, Sister Lulu!” He shook hands with Floyd, warmly, and with Lulu more warmly. “And I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you were both so gallant and polite as to take the trouble and come and explain it to me. That was real courtesy, when I’d been such a silly idiot!Thatnight—I suffered so over what I thought was your disloyalty that I didn’t think I’d live through the night. But come! Shall we not talk of it again? All’s understood now, and all’s right!” He shook hands all over again. “And now that I’ve found you, two old friends like you—of course I’m still practically a stranger in Zenith—I’m not going to let you go! I’m going to come out and call on you. Do you belong to any church body here in Zenith?”
“Well, no, not exactly,” said Floyd.
“Can’t I persuade you to come here, sometimes, and perhaps think of joining later?”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Reverend, in the auto business—kind of against my religion, at that, but you know how it is, in the auto business we’re awful’ busy on Sunday.”
“Well, perhaps Lulu would like to come now and then.”
“Sure. Women ought to stick by the church, that’s what I always say. Dunno just how we got out of the habit, here in the city, and we’ve always talked about starting going again, but— Oh, we just kinda never got around to it, I guess.”
“I hope, uh, I hope, Brother Floyd, that our miscomprehension, yours and mine that evening, had nothing to do with your alienation from the church! Oh, that would be a pity! Yes. Such a pity! But I could, perhaps, have a—a comprehension of it.” (He saw that Lulu wasn’t missing one of his dulcet and sinuous phrases; so different from Floyd’s rustic blurting. Shewaspretty. Just plump enough. Cleo would be a fat old woman, he was afraid, instead of handsome. He couldn’t of married Lulu. No. He’d been right. Small-town stuff. But awful nice to pat!) “Yes, I think I could understand it if you’d been offended, Floyd. What a young chump I was, even if Iwasa preacher, to not—not to see the real situation. Really, it’s you who must forgive me for my wooden-headedness, Floyd!”
Sheepishly, Floyd grunted, “Well, Ididthink you flew off the handle kind of easy, and I guess it did make me kind of sore. But it don’t matter none now.”
Very interestedly, Elmer inquired of Floyd, “And I’ll bet Lulu was even angrier at me for my silliness!”
“No, by gosh, she never would let me say a word against you, Reverend! Ha, ha, ha! Look at her! By golly, if she ain’t blushing! Well, sir, that’s a good one on her all right!”
Elmer looked, intently.
“Well, I’m glad everything’s explained,” he said unctuously. “Now, Sister Lulu, you must let me come out and explain about our fine friendly neighborhood church here, and the splendid work we’re doing. I know that with two dear kiddies—two, was it?—splendid!—with them and a fine husband to look after, you must be kept pretty busy, but perhaps you might find time to teach a Sunday School class or, anyway, you might like to come to our jolly church suppers on Wednesday now and then. I’ll tell you about our work, and you can talk it over with Floyd and see what he thinks. What would be a good time to call on you, and what’s the address, Lulu? How, uh, how would tomorrow afternoon, about three, do? I wish I could come when Floyd’s there, but all my evenings are so dreadfully taken up.”
Next afternoon, at five minutes to three, the Reverend Elmer Gantry entered the cheap and flimsy apartment-house in which lived Floyd and Mrs. Naylor, impatiently kicked a baby-carriage out of the way, panted a little as he skipped up-stairs, and stood glowing, looking at Lulu as she opened the door.
“All alone?” he said—he almost whispered.
Her eyes dropped before his. “Yes. The boys are in school.”
“Oh, that’s too bad! I’d hoped to see them.” As the door closed, as they stood in the inner hall, he broke out, “Oh, Lulu, my darling, I thought I’d lost you forever, and now I’ve found you again! Oh, forgive me for speaking like that! I shouldn’t have! Forgive me! But if you knew how I’ve thought of you, dreamed of you, waited for you, all these years—— No. I’m not allowed to talk like that. It’s wicked. But we’re going to be friends, aren’t we, such dear, trusting, tender friends . . . Floyd and you and I?”
“Oh,yes!” she breathed, as she led him into the shabby sitting-room with its thrice-painted cane rockers, its couch covered with a knitted shawl, its department-store chromos of fruit and Versailles.
They stood recalling each other in the living-room. He muttered huskily, “Dear, it wouldn’t be wrong for you to kiss me? Just once? Would it? To let me know you really do forgive me? You see, now we’re like brother and sister.”
She kissed him, shyly, fearfully, and she cried, “Oh, my darling, it’s been so long!” Her arms clung about his neck, invincible, unrestrained.
When the boys came in from school and rang the clicker bell down-stairs, the romantics were unduly cordial to them. When the boys had gone out to play, she cried, wildly, “Oh, I know it’s wrong, but I’ve always loved you so!”
He inquired interestedly, “Do you feel wickeder because I’m a minister?”
“No! I’m proud of it! Like as if you were different from other men—like you were somehow closer to God. I’mproudyou’re a preacher! Any woman would be! It’s—you know. Different!”
He kissed her. “Oh, you darling!” he said.
They had to be careful. Elmer had singularly little relish for having the horny-handed Floyd Naylor come in some afternoon and find him with Lulu.
Like many famous lovers in many ages, they found refuge in the church. Lulu was an admirable cook, and while in her new life in Zenith she had never reached out for such urban opportunities as lectures or concerts or literary clubs, she had by some obscure ambitiousness, some notion of a shop of her own, been stirred to attend a cooking-school and learn salads and pastry and canapés. Elmer was able to give her a weekly Tuesday evening cooking-class to teach at Wellspring, and even to get out of the trustees for her a salary of five dollars a week.
The cooking-class was over at ten. By that time the rest of the church was cleared, and Elmer had decided that Tuesday evening would be a desirable time for reading in his church office.
Cleo had many small activities in the church—clubs, Epworth League, fancy-work—but none on Tuesday evening.
Before Lulu came stumbling through the quiet church basement, the dark and musty corridor, before she tapped timidly at his door, he would be walking up and down, and when he held out his arms she flew into them unreasoning.
He had a new contentment.
“I’m really not a bad fellow. I don’t go chasing after women—oh, that fool woman at the hotel didn’t count—not now that I’ve got Lulu. Cleo neverwasmarried to me; she doesn’t matter. I like to be good. If I’d just been married to somebody like Sharon! O God! Sharon! Am I untrue to her? No! Dear Lulu, sweet kid, I owe something to her, too. I wonder if I could get to see her Saturday—”
A new contentment he had, and explosive success.
CHAPTER XXVI
inthe autumn of his first year in Zenith Elmer started his famous Lively Sunday Evenings. Mornings, he announced, he would give them solid religious meat to sustain them through the week, but Sunday evenings he would provide the best cream puffs. Christianity was a Glad Religion, and he was going to make it a lot gladder.
There was a safe, conservative, sanguinary hymn or two at his Lively Sunday Evenings, and a short sermon about sunsets, authors, or gambling, but most of the time they were just happy boys and girls together. He had them sing “Auld Lang Syne,” and “Swanee River,” with all the balladry which might have been considered unecclesiastical if it had not been hallowed by the war: “Tipperary” and “There’s a Long, Long, Trail,” and “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag and Smile, Smile, Smile.”
He made the women sing in contest against the men; the young people against the old; and the sinners against the Christians. That was lots of fun, because some of the most firmly saved brethren, like Elmer himself, pretended for a moment to be sinners. He made them whistle the chorus and hum it and speak it; he made them sing it while they waved handkerchiefs, waved one hand, waved both hands.
Other attractive features he provided. There was a ukulele solo by the champion uke-player from the University of Winnemac. There was a song rendered by a sweet little girl of three, perched up on the pulpit. There was a mouth-organ contest, between the celebrated Harmonica Quartette from the Higginbotham Casket Factory and the best four harmonicists from the B. & K. C. railroad shops; surprisingly won (according to the vote of the congregation) by the enterprising and pleasing young men from the railroad.
When this was over, Elmer stepped forward and said—you would never in the world have guessed he was joking unless you were near enough to catch the twinkle in his eyes—he said, “Now perhaps some of you folks think the pieces the boys have played tonight, like ‘Marching Through Georgia’ and ‘Mammy,’ aren’t quite proper for a Methodist Church, but just let me show you how well our friend and brother, Billy Hicks here, can make the old mouth-organ behave in a real highbrow religious hymn.”
And Billy played “Ach Du Lieber Augustin.”
How they all laughed, even the serious old stewards! And when he had them in this humor, the Reverend Mr. Gantry was able to slam home, good and hard, some pretty straight truths about the horrors of starting children straight for hell by letting them read the colored comics on Sunday morning.
Once, to illustrate the evils of betting, he had them bet as to which of two frogs would jump first. Once he had the representative of an illustrious grape-juice company hand around sample glasses of his beverage, to illustrate the superiority of soft drinks to the horrors of alcohol. And once he had up on the platform a sickening twisted motor-car in which three people had been killed at a railroad-crossing. With this as an example, he showed his flock that motor speeding was but one symptom of the growing madness and worldliness and materialism of the age, and that this madness could be cured only by returning to the simple old-time religion as preached at the Wellspring Methodist Church.
The motor-car got him seven columns of publicity, with pictures of himself, the car, and the killed motorists.
In fact there were few of his new paths to righteousness which did not get adequate and respectful attention from the press.
There was, perhaps, no preacher in Zenith, not even the liberal Unitarian minister or the powerful Catholic bishop, who was not fond of the young gentlemen of the press. The newspapers of Zenith were as likely to attack religion as they were to attack the department-stores. But of all the clerics, none was so hearty, so friendly, so brotherly, to the reporters as the Reverend Elmer Gantry. His rival parsons were merely cordial to the sources of publicity when they called. Elmer did his own calling.
Six months after his coming to Zenith he began preparing a sermon on “The Making and Mission of a Great Newspaper.” He informed the editors of his plan, and had himself taken through the plants and introduced to the staffs of theAdvocate-Times, its sister, theEvening Advocate, thePress, theGazette, and theCrier.
Out of his visits he managed to seize and hold the acquaintanceship of at least a dozen reporters. And he met the magnificent Colonel Rutherford Snow, owner of theAdvocate, a white-haired, blasphemous, religious, scoundrelly old gentleman, whose social position in Zenith was as high as that of a bank-president or a corporation-counsel. Elmer and the Colonel recognized in each other an enterprising boldness, and the Colonel was so devoted to the church and its work in preserving the free and democratic American institutions that he regularly gave to the Pilgrim Congregational Church more than a tenth of what he made out of patent medicine advertisements—cancer cures, rupture cures, tuberculosis cures, and the notices of Old Dr. Bly. The Colonel was cordial to Elmer, and gave orders that his sermons should be reported at least once a month, no matter how the rest of the clergy shouted for attention.
But somehow Elmer could not keep the friendship of Bill Kingdom, that peculiarly hard-boiled veteran reporter of theAdvocate-Times. He did everything he could; he called Bill by his first name, he gave him a quarter cigar, and he said “damn,” but Bill looked uninterested when Elmer came around with the juiciest of stories about dance-halls. In grieved and righteous wrath, Elmer turned his charm on younger members of theAdvocatestaff, who were still new enough to be pleased by the good-fellowship of a preacher who could say “damn.”
Elmer was particularly benevolent with one Miss Coey, sob-sister reporter for theEvening Gazetteand an enthusiastic member of his church. She was worth a column a week. He always breathed at her after church.
Lulu raged, “It’s hard enough to sit right there in the same pew with your wife, and never be introduced to her, because you say it isn’t safe! But when I see you holding hands with that Coey woman, it’s a little too much!”
But he explained that he considered Miss Coey a fool, that it made him sick to touch her, that he was nice to her only because he had to get publicity; and Lulu saw that it was all proper and truly noble of him . . . even when in the church bulletins, which he wrote each week for general distribution, he cheered, “Let’s all congratulate Sister Coey, who so brilliantly represents the Arts among us, on her splendid piece in the recentGazetteabout the drunken woman who was saved by the Salvation Army. Your pastor felt the quick tears springing to his eyes as he read it, which is a tribute to Sister Coey’s powers of expression. And he is always glad to fellowship with the Salvation Army, as well as with all other branches of the true Protestant Evangelical Universal Church. Wellspring is the home of liberality, so long as it does not weaken morality or the proven principles of Bible Christianity.”
As important as publicity to Elmer was the harassing drive of finance.
He had made one discovery superb in its simple genius—the best way to get money was to ask for it, hard enough and often enough. To call on rich men, to set Sunday School classes in competition against one another, to see that every one received pledge-envelopes, these were all useful and he pursued them earnestly. But none of them was so useful as to tell the congregation every Sunday what epochal good Wellspring and its pastor were doing, how much greater good they could do if they had more funds, and to demand their support now, this minute.
His Official Board was charmed to see the collections increasing even faster than the audiences. They insisted that the bishop send Elmer back to them for another year—indeed for many years—and they raised Elmer’s salary to forty-five hundred dollars.
And in the autumn they let him have two subordinates—the Reverend Sidney Webster, B.A., B.D., as Assistant Pastor, and Mr. Henry Wink, B.A., as Director of Religious Education.
Mr. Webster had been secretary to Bishop Toomis, and it was likely that he would some day be secretary of one of the powerful church boards—the board of publications, the board of missions, the board of temperance and morals. He was a man of twenty-eight; he had been an excellent basket-ball player in Boston University; he was tight-mouthed as a New England president, efficient as an adding machine, and cold as the heart of a bureaucrat. If he loved God and humanity-in-general with rigid devotion, he loved no human individual; if he hated sin, he was too contemptuous of any actual sinner to hate him—he merely turned his frigid face away and told him to go to hell. He had no vices. He was also competent. He could preach, get rid of beggars, be quietly devout in death-bed prayers, keep down church expenses, and explain about the Trinity.
Henry Wink had a lisp and he told little simpering stories, but he was admirable in the direction of the Sunday School, vacation Bible schools, and the Epworth Leagues.
With Mr. Webster and Mr. Wink removing most of the church detail from him, Elmer became not less but more occupied. He no longer merely invited the public, but galloped out and dragged it in. He no longer merely scolded sin. He gratifyingly ended it.
When he had been in Zenith for a year and three-quarters, Elmer formed the Committee on Public Morals, and conducted his raids on the red-light district.
It seemed to him that he was getting less publicity. Even his friend, Colonel Rutherford Snow, owner of theAdvocate-Times, explained that just saying things couldn’t go on being news; news was essentially a report of things done.
“All right, I’lldothings, by golly, now that I’ve got Webster and Wink to take care of the glad hand for the brethren!” Elmer vowed.
He received an inspiration to the effect that all of a sudden, for reasons not defined, “things have gotten so bad in Zenith, immorality is so rampant in high places and low, threatening the morals of youth and the sanctity of domesticity, that it is not enough for the ministry to stand back warning the malefactors, but a time now to come out of our dignified seclusion and personally wage open war on the forces of evil.”
He said these startling things in the pulpit, he said them in an interview, and he said them in a letter to the most important clergymen in town, inviting them to meet with him to form a Committee on Public Morals and make plans for open war.
The devil must have been shaken. Anyway, the newspapers said that the mere threat of the formation of the Committee had caused “a number of well-known crooks and women of bad reputation to leave town.” Who these scoundrels were, the papers did not say.
The Committee was to be composed of the Reverends Elmer Gantry and Otto Hickenlooper, Methodists; G. Prosper Edwards, Congregationalist; John Jennison Drew, Presbyterian; Edmund St. Vincent Zahn, Lutheran; James F. Gomer, Disciples; Father Matthew Smeesby, Catholic; Bernard Amos, Jewish; Hosea Jessup, Baptist; Willis Fortune Tate, Episcopalian; and Irving Tillish, Christian Science reader; with Wallace Umstead, the Y. M. C. A. secretary, four moral laymen, and a lawyer, Mr. T. J. Rigg.
They assembled at lunch in a private dining-room at the palatial Zenith Athletic Club. Being clergymen, and having to prove that they were also red-blooded, as they gathered before lunch in the lobby of the club they were particularly boisterous in shouting to passing acquaintances, florists and doctors and wholesale plumbers. To one George Babbitt, a real estate man, Dr. Drew, the Presbyterian, clamored, “Hey, Georgie! Got a flask along? Lunching with a bunch of preachers, and I reckon they’ll want a drink!”
There was great admiration on the part of Mr. Babbitt, and laughter among all the clergymen, except the Episcopal Mr. Tate and the Christian Scientific Mr. Tillish.
The private dining-room at the club was a thin red apartment with two pictures of young Indian maidens of Lithuanian origin sitting in native costumes, which gave free play to their legs, under a rugged pine-tree against a background of extremely high mountains. In Private Dining-room A, beside them, was a lunch of the Men’s Furnishers Association, addressed by S. Garrison Siegel of New York on “The Rented Dress Suit Business and How to Run It in a High-class Way.”
The incipient Committee on Public Morals sat about a long narrow table in bent-wood chairs, in which they were always vainly trying to tilt back. Their table did not suggest debauchery and the demon rum. There were only chilly and naked-looking goblets of ice water.
They lunched, gravely, on consommé, celery, roast lamb, which was rather cold, mashed potatoes, which were arctic, Brussels sprouts, which were overstewed, ice cream, which was warm; with very large cups of coffee, and no smoking afterward.
Elmer began, “I don’t know who is the oldest among us, but certainly no one in this room has had a more distinguished or more valuable term of Christian service than Dr. Edwards, of Pilgrim Congregational, and I know you’ll join me in asking him to say grace before meat.”
The table conversation was less cheerful than the blessing.
They all detested one another. Every one knew of some case in which each of the others had stolen, or was said to have tried to steal, some parishioner, to have corrupted his faith and appropriated his contributions. Dr. Hickenlooper and Dr. Drew had each advertised that he had the largest Sunday School in the city. All of the Protestants wanted to throw ruinous questions about the Immaculate Conception at Father Smeesby, and Father Smeesby, a smiling dark man of forty, had ready, in case they should attack the Catholic Church, the story of the ant who said to the elephant, “Move over, who do you think you’re pushing?” All of them, except Mr. Tillish, wanted to ask Mr. Tillish how he’d ever been fooled by this charlatan, Mary Baker Eddy, and all of them, except the rabbi, wanted to ask Rabbi Amos why the Jews were such numbskulls as not to join the Christian faith.
They were dreadfully cordial. They kept their voices bland, and smiled too often, and never listened to one another. Elmer, aghast, saw that they would flee before making an organization if he did not draw them together. And what was the one thing in which they were all joyously interested? Why, vice! He’d begin the vice rampage now, instead of waiting till the business meeting after lunch.
He pounded on the table, and demanded, “Most of you have been in Zenith longer than myself. I admit ignorance. It is true that I have unearthed many dreadful,dreadfulcases of secret sin. But you gentlemen, who know the town so much better—— Am I right? Are Conditions as dreadful as I think, or do I exaggerate?”
All of them lighted up and, suddenly looking on Elmer as a really nice man after all, they began happily to tell of their woeful discoveries. . . . The blood-chilling incident of the father who found in the handbag of his sixteen-year-old daughter improper pictures. The suspicion that at a dinner of war veterans at the Leroy House there had danced a young lady who wore no garments save slippers and a hat.
“I know all about that dinner—I got the details from a man in my church—I’ll tell you about it if you feel you ought to know,” said Dr. Gomer.
They looked as though they decidedly felt that they ought to know. He went into details, very, and at the end Dr. Jessup gulped, “Oh, that Leroy House is absolutely a den of iniquity! It ought to be pulled!”
“It certainly ought to! I don’t think I’m cruel,” shouted Dr. Zahn, the Lutheran, “but if I had my way, I’d burn the proprietor of that joint at the stake!”
All of them had incidents of shocking obscenity all over the place—all of them except Father Smeesby, who sat back and smiled, the Episcopal Dr. Tate, who sat back and looked bored, and Mr. Tillish, the healer, who sat back and looked chilly. In fact it seemed as though, despite the efforts of themselves and the thousands of other inspired and highly trained Christian ministers who had worked over it ever since its foundation, the city of Zenith was another Sodom. But the alarmed apostles did not appear to be so worried as they said they were. They listened with almost benign attention while Dr. Zahn, in his German accent, told of alarming crushes between the society girls whom he knew so well from dining once a year with his richest parishioner.
They were all, indeed, absorbed in vice to a degree gratifying to Elmer.
But at the time for doing something about it, for passing resolutions and appointing sub-committees and outlining programs, they drew back.
“Can’t we all get together—pool our efforts?” pleaded Elmer. “Whatever our creedal differences, surely we stand alike in worshiping the same God and advocating the same code of morals. I’d like to see this Committee as a permanent organization, and finally, when the time is ripe—— Think how it would jolt the town! All of us getting ourselves appointed special police or deputy sheriffs, and personally marching down on these abominations, arresting the blood-guilty wretches, and putting them where they can do no harm! Maybe leading our church-members in the crusade! Think of it!”
They did think of it, and they were alarmed.
Father Smeesby spoke. “My church, gentlemen, probably has a more rigid theology than yours, but I don’t think we’re quite so alarmed by discovering the fact, which seems to astonish you, that sinners often sin. The Catholic Church may be harder to believe, but it’s easier to live with.”
“My organization,” said Mr. Tillish, “could not think of joining in a wild witch-hunt, any more than we could in indiscriminate charity. For both the poverty-laden and the vicious—” He made a little whistling between his beautiful but false teeth, and went on with frigid benignancy. “For all such, the truth is clearly stated in ‘Science and Health’ and made public in all our meetings—the truth that both vice and poverty, like sickness, are unreal, are errors, to be got rid of by understanding that God is All-in-all; that disease, death, evil, sin deny good, omnipotent God, life. Well! If these so-called sufferers do not care to take the truth when it is freely offered them, is that our fault? I understand your sympathy with the unfortunate, but you are not going to put out ignorance by fire.”
“Golly, let me crawl too,” chuckled Rabbi Amos. “If you want to get a vice-crusading rabbi, get one of these smart-aleck young liberals from the Cincinnati school—and they’ll mostly have too much sympathy with the sinners to help you either! Anyway, my congregation is so horribly respectable that if their rabbi did anything but sit in his study and look learned, they’d kick him out.”
“And I,” said Dr. Willis Fortune Tate, of St. Colomb’s Episcopal, “if you will permit me to say so, can regard such a project as our acting like policemen and dealing with these malefactors in person as nothing short of vulgar, as well as useless. I understand your high ideals, Dr. Gantry—”
“Mr. Gantry.”
“—Mr. Gantry, and I honor you for them, and respect your energy, but I beg you to consider how the press and the ordinary laity, with their incurably common and untrained minds, would misunderstand.”
“I’m afraid I must agree with Dr. Tate,” said the Congregational Dr. G. Prosper Edwards, in the manner of the Pilgrim’s Monument agreeing with Westminster Abbey.
And as for the others, they said they really must “take time and think it over,” and they all got away as hastily and cordially as they could.
Elmer walked with his friend and pillar, Mr. T. J. Rigg, toward the dentist’s office in which even an ordained minister of God would shortly take on strangely normal writhings and gurglings.
“They’re a fine bunch of scared prophets, a noble lot of apostolic ice-cream cones!” protested Mr. Rigg. “Hard luck, Brother Elmer! I’m sorry. It really is good stuff, this vice-crusading. Oh, I don’t suppose it makes the slightest difference in the amount of vice—and I don’t know that it ought to make any. Got to give fellows that haven’t our advantages some chance to let off steam. But it does get the church a lot of attention. I’m mighty proud of the way we’re building up Wellspring Church again. Kind of a hobby with me. But makes me indignant, these spiritual cold-storage eggs not supporting you!”
But as he looked up he saw that Elmer was grinning.
“I’m not worried, T. J. Fact, I’m tickled to death. First place, I’ve scared ’em off the subject of vice. Before they get back to preaching about it, I’ll have the whole subject absolutely patented for our church. And now they won’t have the nerve to imitate me if I do this personal crusading stunt. Third, I can preach against ’em! And I will! You watch me! Oh, not mention any names—no come-back—but tell ’em how I pleaded with a gang of preachers to take practical methods to end immorality, and they were all scared!”
“Fine!” said the benevolent trustee. “We’ll let ’em know that Wellspring is the one church that’s really following the gospel.”
“We sure will! Now listen, T. J.: if you trustees will stand for the expense, I want to get a couple of good private detectives or something, and have ’em dig up a lot of real addresses of places thatarevicious—there must be some of ’em—and get some evidence. Then I’ll jump on the police for not having pinched these places. I’ll say they’re so wide open that the policemustknow of ’em. And probably that’s true, too. Man! A sensation! Run our disclosures every Sunday evening for a month! Make the chief of police try to answer us in the press!”
“Good stuff! Well, I know a fellow—he was a government man, prohibition agent, and got fired for boozing and blackmail. He’s not exactly a double-crosser, lot straighter than most prohibition agents, but still I think he could slip us some real addresses. I’ll have him see you.”
When from his pulpit the Reverend Elmer Gantry announced that the authorities of Zenith were “deliberately conniving in protected vice,” and that he could give the addresses and ownerships of sixteen brothels, eleven blind tigers, and two agencies for selling cocaine and heroin, along with an obscene private burlesque show so dreadful that he could only hint at the nature of its program, when he attacked the chief of police and promised to give more detailed complaints next Sunday, then the town exploded.
There were front-page newspaper stories, yelping replies by the mayor and chief of police, re-replies from Elmer, interviews with everybody, and a full-page account of white slavery in Chicago. In clubs and offices, in church societies and the back-rooms of “soft-drink stands,” there was a blizzard of talk. Elmer had to be protected against hundreds of callers, telephoners, letter writers. His assistant, Sidney Webster, and Miss Bundle, the secretary, could not keep the mob from him, and he hid out in T. J. Rigg’s house, accessible to no one, except to newspaper reporters who for any Christian and brotherly reason might care to see him.
For the second Sunday evening of his jeremiad, the church was full half an hour before opening-time, standing-room was taken even to the back of the lobby, hundreds clamored at the closed doors.
He gave the exact addresses of eight dives, told what dreadful drinkings of corn whisky went on there, and reported the number of policemen, in uniform, who had been in the more attractive of these resorts during the past week.
Despite all the police could do to help their friends close up for a time, it was necessary for them to arrest ten or fifteen of the hundred-odd criminals whom Elmer named. But the chief of police triumphed by announcing that it was impossible to find any of the others.
“All right,” Elmer murmured to the chief, in the gentleness of a boxed newspaper interview in bold-face type, “if you’ll make me a temporary lieutenant of police and give me a squad, I’ll find and close five dives in one evening—any evening save Sunday.”
“I’ll do it—and you can make your raids tomorrow,” said the chief, in the official dignity of headlines.
Mr. Rigg was a little alarmed.
“Think you’re going too far, Elmer,” he said. “If you really antagonize any of the big wholesale bootleggers, they’ll get us financially, and if you hit any of the tough ones, they’re likely to bump you off. Darn’ dangerous.”
“I know. I’m just going to pick out some of the smaller fellows that make their own booze and haven’t got any police protection except slipping five or ten to the cop on the beat. The newspapers will make ’em out regular homicidal gangsters, to get a good story, and we’ll have the credit without being foolish and taking risks.”
At least a thousand people were trying to get near the Central Police Station on the evening when a dozen armed policemen marched down the steps of the station-house and stood at attention, looking up at the door, awaiting their leader.
He came out, the great Reverend Mr. Gantry, and stood posing on the steps, while the policemen saluted, the crowd cheered or sneered, and the press cameras went off in a fury of flashlight powder. He wore the gilt-encircled cap of a police lieutenant, with a lugubrious frock coat and black trousers, and under his arm he carried a Bible.
Two patrol wagons clanged away, and all the women in the crowd, except certain professional ladies, who were grievously profane, gasped their admiration of this modern Savonarola.
He had promised the mob at least one real house of prostitution.
There were two amiable young females who, tired of working in a rather nasty bread factory and of being unremuneratively seduced by the large, pale, puffy bakers on Sunday afternoons, had found it easier and much jollier to set up a small flat in a street near Elmer’s church. They were fond of reading the magazines and dancing to the phonograph and of going to church—usually Elmer’s church. If their relations to their gentlemen friends were more comforting than a preacher could expect, after his experience of the sacred and chilly state of matrimony, they entertained only a few of these friends, often they darned their socks, and almost always they praised Elmer’s oratory.
One of the girls, this evening, was discoursing with a man who was later proved in court not to be her husband; the other was in the kitchen, making a birthday-cake for her niece and humming “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” She was dazed by a rumbling, a clanging, a shouting in the street below, then mob-sounds on the stairs. She fluttered into the living-room, to see their pretty imitation mahogany door smashed in with a rifle butt.
Into the room crowded a dozen grinning policemen, followed, to her modest shame, by her adored family prophet, the Reverend Gantry. But it was not the cheerful, laughing Mr. Gantry that she knew. He held out his arm in a horrible gesture of holiness, and bawled, “Scarlet woman! Thy sins be upon thy head! No longer are you going to get away with leading poor unfortunate young men into the sink and cesspool of iniquity! Sergeant! Draw your revolver! These women are known to be up to every trick!”
“All right, sure, loot!” giggled the brick-faced police sergeant.
“Oh, rats! This girl looks as dangerous as a goldfish, Gantry,” remarked Bill Kingdom, of theAdvocate-Times. . . he who was two hours later to do an epic of the heroism of the Great Crusader.
“Let’s see what the other girl’s up to,” snickered one of the policemen.
They all laughed very much as they looked into the bedroom, where a half-dressed girl and a man shrank by the window, their faces sick with shame.
It was with her—ignoring Bill Kingdom’s mutters of “Oh, drop it! Pick on somebody your size!”—that Elmer the vice-slayer became really Biblical.
Only the insistence of Bill Kingdom kept Lieutenant Gantry from making his men load the erring one into the patrol wagon in her chemise.
Then Elmer led them to a secret den where, it was securely reported, men were ruining their bodies and souls by guzzling the devil’s brew of alcohol.
Mr. Oscar Hochlauf had been a saloon-keeper in the days before prohibition, but when prohibition came, he was a saloon-keeper. A very sound, old-fashioned, drowsy, agreeable resort was Oscar’s Place; none of the grander public houses had more artistic soap scrawls on the mirror behind the bar; none had spicier pickled herring.
Tonight there were three men before the bar: Emil Fischer, the carpenter, who had a mustache like an ear-muff; his son Ben, whom Emil was training to drink wholesome beer instead of the whisky and gin which America was forcing on the people; and old Daddy Sorenson, the Swedish tailor.
They were discussing jazz.
“I came to America for liberty—I think Ben’s son will go back to Germany for liberty,” said Emil. “When I was a young man here, four of us used to play every Saturday evening—Bach we played, and Brahms—Gott weisswe played terrible, but we liked it, and we never made others listen. Now, wherever you go, this jazz, like a St. Vitus’s. Jazz iss to music what this Reverend Gantry you read about is to an old-timePrediger. I guess maybe he was never born, that Gantry fellow—he was blowed out of a saxophone.”
“Aw, this country’s all right, Pa,” said Ben.
“Sure, dot’s right,” said Oscar Hochlauf contentedly, while he sliced the foam off a glass of beer. “The Americans, like when I knew dem first, when dere was Bill Nye and Eugene Field, dey used to laugh. Now dey get solemn. When dey start laughing again, dey roar dere heads off at fellows like Gantry and most all dese preachers dat try to tell everybody how dey got to live. And if the people laugh—oof!—God help the preachers!”
“Vell, that’s how it is. Say, did I tell you, Oscar,” said the Swedish tailor, “my grandson Villiam, he got a scholarship in the university!”
“That’s fine!” they all agreed, slapping Daddy Sorenson on the back . . . as a dozen policemen, followed by a large and gloomy gentleman armed with a Bible, burst in through the front and back doors, and the gloomy gentleman, pointing at the astounded Oscar, bellowed, “Arrest that man and hold all these other fellows!”
To Oscar then, and to an audience increasing ten a second:
“I’ve got you! You’re the kind that teaches young boys to drink—it’s you that start them on the road to every hellish vice, to gambling and murder, with your hellish beverages, with your draught of the devil himself!”
Arrested for the first time in his life, bewildered, broken, feebly leaning on the arms of two policemen, Oscar Hochlauf straightened at this, and screamed:
“Dot’s a damned lie! Always when you let me, I handle Eitelbaum’s beer, the finest in the state, and since den I make my own beer. It is good! It is honest! ‘Hellish beverage!’ Dotyoushould judge of beer—dot a pig should judge poetry! Your Christ dot made vine,hevould like my beer!”
Elmer jumped forward with his great fist doubled. Only the sudden grip of the police sergeant kept him from striking down the blasphemer. He shrieked, “Take that foul-mouthed bum to the wagon! I’ll see he gets the limit!”
And Bill Kingdom murmured to himself, “Gallant preacher single-handed faces saloon full of desperate gun-men and rebukes them for taking the name of the Lord in vain. Oh, I’ll get a swell story. . . . Then I think I’ll commit suicide.”
The attendant crowd and the policemen had whispered that, from the careful way in which he followed instead of leading, it might be judged that the Reverend Lieutenant Gantry was afraid of the sinister criminals whom he was attacking. And it is true that Elmer had no large fancy for revolver duels. But he had not lost his delight in conflict; he was physically no coward; and they were all edified to see this when the raiders dashed into the resort of Nick Spoletti.
Nick, who conducted a bar in a basement, had been a prizefighter; he was cool and quick. He heard the crusaders coming and shouted to his customers, “Beat it! Side door! I’ll hold ’em back!”
He met the first of the policemen at the bottom of the steps, and dropped him with the crack of a bottle over his head. The next tripped over the body, and the others halted, peering, looking embarrassed, drawing revolvers. But Elmer smelled battle. He forgot holiness. He dropped his Bible, thrust aside two policemen, and swung on Nick from the bottom step. Nick slashed at his head, but with a boxer’s jerk of the neck Elmer slid away from the punch, and knocked out Nick with a deliberately murderous left.
“Golly, the parson’s got an awful wallop!” grunted the sergeant, and Bill Kingdom sighed, “Not so bad!” and Elmer knew that he had won . . . that he would be the hero of Zenith . . . that he was now the Sir Lancelot as well as the William Jennings Bryan of the Methodist Church.
After two more raids he was delivered at his home by patrol wagon, and left with not entirely sardonic cheers by the policemen.
Cleo rushed to meet him, crying, “Oh, you’re safe! Oh, my dear, you’re hurt!”
His cheek was slightly bleeding.
In a passion of admiration for himself so hot that it extended even to her, he clasped her, kissed her wetly, and roared, “It’s nothing! Oh, it went great! We raided five places—arrested twenty-seven criminals—took them in every sort of horrible debauchery—things I never dreamed could exist!”
“You poor dear!”
There was not enough audience, with merely Cleo, and the maid peering from the back of the hall.
“Let’s go and tell the kids. Maybe they’ll be proud of their dad!” he interrupted her.
“Dear, they’re asleep—”
“Oh! I see! Sleep is more important to ’em than to know their father is a man who isn’t afraid to back up his gospel with his very life!”
“Oh, I didn’t mean—I meant—Yes, of course, you’re right. It’ll be a wonderful example and inspiration. But let me put some stickum plaster on your cheek first.”
By the time she had washed the cut, and bound it and fussed over it, he had forgotten the children and their need of an heroic exemplar, as she had expected, and he sat on the edge of the bath-tub telling her that he was an entire Trojan army. She was so worshipful that he became almost amorous, until it seemed to him from her anxious patting of his arm that she was trying to make him so. It angered him—that she, so unappealing, should have the egotism to try to attract a man like himself. He went off to his own room, wishing that Lulu were here to rejoice in his splendor, the beginning of his fame as the up-to-date John Wesley.