IV

When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound, and time shall be no more,And the morning breaks eternal, bright and fair. . . .

When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound, and time shall be no more,

And the morning breaks eternal, bright and fair. . . .

They stood for the singing of “Shall We Gather at the River?” Elmer inarticulately began to feel his community with these humble, aspiring people—his own prairie tribe: this gaunt carpenter, a good fellow, full of friendly greetings; this farm-wife, so courageous, channeled by pioneer labor; this classmate, an admirable basket-ball player, yet now chanting beatifically, his head back, his eyes closed, his voice ringing. Elmer’s own people. Could he be a traitor to them, could he resist the current of their united belief and longing?

Yes, we’ll gather at the river,The beautiful, the beautiful river,Gather with the saints at the riverThat flows by the throne of God.

Yes, we’ll gather at the river,

The beautiful, the beautiful river,

Gather with the saints at the river

That flows by the throne of God.

Could he endure it to be away from them, in the chill void of Jim Lefferts’ rationalizing, on that day when they should be rejoicing in the warm morning sunshine by the river rolling to the imperishable Throne?

And his voice—he had merely muttered the words of the first hymn—boomed out ungrudgingly:

Soon our pilgrimage will cease;Soon our happy hearts will quiverWith the melody of peace.

Soon our pilgrimage will cease;

Soon our happy hearts will quiver

With the melody of peace.

His mother stroked his sleeve. He remembered that she had maintained he was the best singer she had ever heard; that Jim Lefferts had admitted, “You certainly can make that hymn dope sound as if it meant something.” He noted that people near by looked about with pleasure when they heard his Big Ben dominate the cracked jangling.

The preliminaries merely warmed up the audience for Judson Roberts. Old Jud was in form. He laughed, he shouted, he knelt and wept with real tears, he loved everybody, he raced down into the audience and patted shoulders, and for the moment everybody felt that he was closer to them than their closest friends.

“Rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race,” was his text.

Roberts was really a competent athlete, and he really had skill in evoking pictures. He described the Chicago-Michigan game, and Elmer was lost in him, with him lived the moments of the scrimmage, the long run with the ball, the bleachers rising to him.

Roberts’ voice softened. He was pleading. He was not talking, he said, to weak men who needed coddling into the Kingdom, but to strong men, to rejoicing men, to men brave in armor. There was another sort of race more exhilarating than any game, and it led not merely to a score on a big board but to the making of a new world—it led not to newspaper paragraphs but to glory eternal. Dangerous—calling for strong men! Ecstatic—brimming with thrills! The team captained by Christ! No timid Jesus did he preach, but the adventurer who had joyed to associate with common men, with reckless fishermen, with captains and rulers, who had dared to face the soldiers in the garden, who had dared the myrmidons of Rome and death itself! Come! Who was gallant? Who had nerve? Who longed to live abundantly? Let them come!

They must confess their sins, they must repent, they must know their own weakness save as they were reborn in Christ. But they must confess not in heaven-pilfering weakness, but in training for the battle under the wind-torn banners of the Mighty Captain. Who would come? Who would come? Who was for vision and the great adventure?

He was among them, Judson Roberts, with his arms held out, his voice a bugle. Young men sobbed and knelt; a woman shrieked; people were elbowing the standers in the aisles and pushing forward to kneel in agonized happiness, and suddenly they were setting relentlessly on a bewildered Elmer Gantry, who had been betrayed into forgetting himself, into longing to be one with Judson Roberts.

His mother was wringing his hand, begging, “Oh, won’t you come? Won’t you make your old mother happy? Let yourself know the joy of surrender to Jesus!” She was weeping, old eyes puckered, and in her weeping was his every recollection of winter dawns when she had let him stay in bed and brought porridge to him across the icy floor; winter evenings when he had awakened to find her still stitching; and that confusing intimidating hour, in the abyss of his first memories, when he had seen her shaken beside a coffin that contained a cold monster in the shape of his father.

The basket-ball player was patting his other arm, begging, “Dear old Hell-cat, you’ve never let yourself be happy! You’ve been lonely! Let yourself be happy with us! You know I’m no mollycoddle. Won’t you know the happiness of salvation with us?”

A thread-thin old man, very dignified, a man with secret eyes that had known battles and mountain-valleys, was holding out his hands to Elmer, imploring with a humility utterly disconcerting, “Oh, come, come with us—don’t stand there making Jesus beg and beg—don’t leave the Christ that died for us standing out in the cold, begging!”

And, somehow, flashing through the crowd, Judson Roberts was with Elmer, honoring him beyond all the multitude, appealing for his friendship—Judson Roberts the gorgeous, beseeching:

“Are you going to hurt me, Elmer? Are you going to let me go away miserable and beaten, old man? Are you going to betray me like Judas, when I’ve offered you my Jesus as the most precious gift I can bring you? Are you going to slap me and defile me and hurt me? Come! Think of the joy of being rid of all those nasty little sins that you’ve felt so ashamed of! Won’t you come kneel with me, won’t you?”

His mother shrieked, “Won’t you, Elmer? With him and me? Won’t you make us happy? Won’t you be big enough to not be afraid? See how we’re all longing for you, praying for you!”

“Yes!” from around him, from strangers; and “Helpmeto follow you, Brother—I’ll go if you will!” Voices woven, thick, dove-white and terrifying black of mourning and lightning-colored, flung around him, binding him— His mother’s pleading, Judson Roberts’ tribute—

An instant he saw Jim Lefferts, and heard him insist: “Why, sure, course they believe it. They hypnotize themselves. But don’t let ’em hypnotize you!”

He saw Jim’s eyes, that for him alone veiled their bright harshness and became lonely, asking for comradeship. He struggled; with all the blubbering confusion of a small boy set on by his elders, frightened and overwhelmed, he longed to be honest, to be true to Jim—to be true to himself and his own good honest sins and whatsoever penalties they might carry. Then the visions were driven away by voices that closed over him like surf above an exhausted swimmer. Volitionless, marveling at the sight of himself as a pinioned giant, he was being urged forward, forced forward, his mother on one arm and Judson on the other, a rhapsodic mob following.

Bewildered. Miserable. . . . False to Jim.

But as he came to the row kneeling in front of the first pew, he had a thought that made everything all right. Yes! He could have both! He could keep Judson and his mother, yet retain Jim’s respect. He had only to bring Jim also to Jesus, then all of them would be together in beatitude!

Freed from misery by that revelation, he knelt, and suddenly his voice was noisy in confession, while the shouts of the audience, the ejaculations of Judson and his mother, exalted him to hot self-approval and made it seem splendidly right to yield to the mystic fervor.

He had but little to do with what he said. The willing was not his but the mob’s; the phrases were not his but those of the emotional preachers and hysterical worshipers whom he had heard since babyhood:

“O God, oh, I have sinned! My sins are heavy on me! I am unworthy of compassion! O Jesus, intercede for me! Oh, let thy blood that was shed for me be my salvation! O God, I do truly repent of my great sinning and I do long for the everlasting peace of thy bosom!”

“Oh, praise God,” from the multitude, and “Praise his holy name! Thank God, thank God, thank God! Oh, hallelujah, Brother, thank the dear loving God!”

He was certain that he would never again want to guzzle, to follow loose women, to blaspheme; he knew the rapture of salvation—yes, and of being the center of interest in the crowd.

Others about him were beating their foreheads, others were shrieking, “Lord, be merciful,” and one woman—he remembered her as a strange, repressed, mad-eyed special student who was not known to have any friends—was stretched out, oblivious of the crowd, jerking, her limbs twitching, her hands clenched, panting rhythmically.

But it was Elmer, tallest of the converts, tall as Judson Roberts, whom all the students and most of the townpeople found important, who found himself important.

His mother was crying, “Oh, this is the happiest hour of my life, dear! This makes up for everything!”

To be able to give her such delight!

Judson was clawing Elmer’s hand, whooping, “Liked to had you on the team at Chicago, but I’m a lot gladder to have you with me on Christ’s team! If you knew how proud I am!”

To be thus linked forever with Judson!

Elmer’s embarrassment was gliding into a robust self-satisfaction.

Then the others were crowding on him, shaking his hand, congratulating him: the football center, the Latin professor, the town grocer. President Quarles, his chin whisker vibrant and his shaven upper lip wiggling from side to side, was insisting, “Come, Brother Elmer, stand up on the platform and say a few words to us—you must—we all need it—we’re thrilled by your splendid example!’ ”

Elmer was not quite sure how he got through the converts, up the steps to the platform. He suspected afterward that Judson Roberts had done a good deal of trained pushing.

He looked down, something of his panic returning. But they were sobbing with affection for him. The Elmer Gantry who had for years pretended that he relished defying the whole college had for those same years desired popularity. He had it now—popularity, almost love, almost reverence, and he felt overpoweringly his rôle as leading man.

He was stirred to more flamboyant confession:

“Oh, for the first time I know the peace of God! Nothing I have ever done has been right, because it didn’t lead to the way and the truth! Here I thought I was a good church-member, but all the time I hadn’t seen the real light. I’d never been willing to kneel down and confess myself a miserable sinner. But I’m kneeling now, and, oh, the blessedness of humility!”

He wasn’t, to be quite accurate, kneeling at all; he was standing up, very tall and broad, waving his hands; and though what he was experiencing may have been the blessedness of humility, it sounded like his announcements of an ability to lick anybody in any given saloon. But he was greeted with flaming hallelujahs, and he shouted on till he was rapturous and very sweaty:

“Come! Come to him now! Oh, it’s funny that I who’ve been so great a sinner could dare to give you his invitation, but he’s almighty and shall prevail, and he giveth his sweet tidings through the mouths of babes and sucklings and the most unworthy, and, lo, the strong shall be confounded and the weak exalted in his sight!”

It was all, the Mithraic phrasing, as familiar as “Good morning” or “How are you?” to the audience, yet he must have put new violence into it, for instead of smiling at the recency of his ardor they looked at him gravely, and suddenly a miracle was beheld.

Ten minutes after his own experience, Elmer made his first conversion.

A pimply youth, long known as a pool-room tout, leaped up, his greasy face working, shrieked, “O God, forgive me!” butted in frenzy through the crowd, ran to the mourners’ bench, lay with his mouth frothing in convulsion.

Then the hallelujahs rose till they drowned Elmer’s accelerated pleading, then Judson Roberts stood with his arm about Elmer’s shoulder, then Elmer’s mother knelt with a light of paradise on her face, and they closed the meeting in a maniac pealing of

Draw me nearer, blessed Lord,To thy precious bleeding side.

Draw me nearer, blessed Lord,

To thy precious bleeding side.

Elmer felt himself victorious over life and king of righteousness.

But it had been only the devoted, the people who had come early and taken front seats, of whom he had been conscious in his transports. The students who had remained at the back of the church now loitered outside the door in murmurous knots, and as Elmer and his mother passed them, they stared, they even chuckled, and he was suddenly cold. . . .

It was hard to give heed to his mother’s wails of joy all the way to her boarding-house.

“Now don’t you dare think of getting up early to see me off on the train,” she insisted. “All I have to do is just to carry my little valise across the street. You’ll need your sleep, after all this stirrin’ up you’ve had tonight—I was so proud—I’ve never known anybody to really wrestle with the Lord like you did. Oh, Elmy, you’ll stay true? You’ve made your old mother so happy! All my life I’ve sorrowed, I’ve waited, I’ve prayed, and now I shan’t ever sorrow again! Oh, you will stay true?”

He threw the last of his emotional reserve into a ringing, “You bet I will, Ma!” and kissed her good-night.

He had no emotion left with which to face walking alone, in a cold and realistic night, down a street not of shining columns but of cottages dumpy amid the bleak snow and unfriendly under the bitter stars.

His plan of saving Jim Lefferts, his vision of Jim with reverent and beatific eyes, turned into a vision of Jim with extremely irate eyes and a lot to say. With that vanishment his own glory vanished.

“Was I,” he wondered, “just a plain damn’ fool?

“Jim warned me they’d nab me if I lost my head.

“Now I suppose I can’t ever even smoke again without going to hell.”

But he wanted a smoke. Right now!

He had a smoke.

It comforted him but little as he fretted on:

“Therewasn’tany fake about it! I really did repent all these darn’ fool sins. Even smoking—I’m going to cut it out. I did feel the—the peace of God.

“But can I keep up this speed? Christ! I can’tdoit! Never take a drink or anything—

“I wonder if the Holy Ghost really was there and getting after me? I did feel different! I did! Or was it just because Judson and Ma and all those Christers were there whooping it up—

“Jud Roberts kidded me into it. With all his Big Brother stuff. Prob’ly pulls it everywhere he goes. Jim’ll claim I—Oh, damn Jim, too! I got some rights! None of his business if I come out and do the fair square thing! And theydidlook up to me when I gave them the invitation! It went off fine and dandy! And that kid coming right up and getting saved. Mighty few fellows ever’ve pulled off a conversion as soon after their own conversion as I did! Moody or none of ’em! I’ll bet it busts the records! Yes, sir, maybe they’re right. Maybe the Lord has got some great use for me, even if I ain’t always been all I might of been . . . some ways . . . but I was never mean or tough or anything like that . . . just had a good time.

“Jim—what right’s he got telling me where I head in? Trouble with him is, he thinks he knows it all. I guess these wise old coots that’ve written all these books about the Bible, I guess they know more’n one smart-aleck Kansas agnostic!

“Yes, sir! The whole crowd! Turned to me like I was an All-American preacher!

“Wouldn’t be so bad to be a preacher if you had a big church and— Lot easier than digging out law-cases and having to put it over a jury and another lawyer maybe smarter’n you are.

“The crowd have to swallow what you tell ’em in a pulpit, and no back-talk or cross-examination allowed!”

For a second he snickered, but:

“Not nice to talk that way. Even if a fellow don’t do what’s right himself, no excuse for his sneering at fellows that do, like preachers. . . . There’s where Jim makes his mistake.

“Not worthy to be a preacher. But if Jim Lefferts thinks for one single solitary second that I’m afraid to be a preacher becausehepulls a lot of guff—I guessIknow how I felt when I stood up and had all them folks hollering and rejoicing— I guessIknow whether I experienced salvation or not! And I don’t require any James Blaine Lefferts to tell me, neither!”

Thus for an hour of dizzy tramping; now colder with doubt than with the prairie wind, now winning back some of the exaltation of his spiritual adventure, but always knowing that he had to confess to an inexorable Jim.

It was after one. Surely Jim would be asleep, and by next day there might be a miracle. Morning always promises miracles.

He eased the door open, holding it with a restraining hand. There was a light on the washstand beside Jim’s bed, but it was a small kerosene lamp turned low. He tiptoed in, his tremendous feet squeaking.

Jim suddenly sat up, turned up the wick. He was red-nosed, red-eyed, and coughing. He stared, and unmoving, by the table, Elmer stared back.

Jim spoke abruptly:

“You son of a sea-cook! You’ve gone and done it! You’ve beensaved! You’ve let them hornswoggle you into being a Baptist witch-doctor! I’m through! You can go—to heaven!”

“Aw, say now, Jim, lissen!”

“I’ve listened enough. I’ve got nothing more to say. And now you listen to me!” said Jim, and he spoke with tongues for three minutes straight.

Most of the night they struggled for the freedom of Elmer’s soul, with Jim not quite losing yet never winning. As Jim’s face had hovered at the gospel meeting between him and the evangelist, blotting out the vision of the cross, so now the faces of his mother and Judson hung sorrowful and misty before him, a veil across Jim’s pleading.

Elmer slept four hours and went out, staggering with weariness, to bring cinnamon buns, a wienie sandwich, and a tin pail of coffee for Jim’s breakfast. They were laboring windily into new arguments, Jim a little more stubborn, Elmer ever more irritable, when no less a dignitary than President the Rev. Dr. Willoughby Quarles, chin whisker, glacial shirt, bulbous waistcoat and all, plunged in under the fat soft wing of the landlady.

The president shook hands a number of times with everybody, he eyebrowed the landlady out of the room, and boomed in his throaty pulpit voice, with belly-rumblings and long-drawn R’s and L’s, a voice very deep and owlish, most holy and fitting to the temple which he created merely by his presence, rebuking to flippancy and chuckles and the puerile cynicisms of the Jim Leffertses—a noise somewhere between the evening bells and the morning jackass:

“Oh, Brother Elmer, that was a brave thing you did! I have never seen a braver! For a great strong man of your gladiatorial powers to not be afraid to humble himself! And your example will do a great deal of good, a grrrrrreat deal of good! And we must catch and hold it. You are to speak at the Y. M. C. A. tonight—special meeting to reënforce the results of our wonderful Prayer Week.”

“Oh, gee, President, I can’t!” Elmer groaned.

“Oh, yes, Brother, you must. Youmust! It’s already announced. If you’ll go out within the next hour, you’ll be gratified to see posters announcing it all over town!”

“But I can’t make a speech!”

“The Lord will give the words if you give the good will! I myself shall call for you at a quarter to seven. God bless you!”

He was gone.

Elmer was completely frightened, completely unwilling, and swollen with delight that after long dark hours when Jim, an undergraduate, had used him dirtily and thrown clods at his intellect, the president of Terwillinger College should have welcomed him to that starched bosom as a fellow-apostle.

While Elmer was making up his mind to do what he had made up his mind to do, Jim crawled into bed and addressed the Lord in a low poisonous tone.

Elmer went out to see the posters. His name was in lovely large letters.

For an hour, late that afternoon, after various classes in which every one looked at him respectfully, Elmer tried to prepare his address for the Y. M. C. A. and affiliated lady worshipers. Jim was sleeping, with a snore like the snarl of a leopard.

In his class in Public Speaking, a course designed to create congressmen, bishops, and sales-managers, Elmer had had to produce discourses on Taxation, the Purpose of God in History, Our Friend the Dog, and the Glory of the American Constitution. But his monthly orations had not been too arduous; no one had grieved if he stole all his ideas and most of his phrasing from the encyclopedia. The most important part of preparation had been the lubrication of his polished-mahogany voice with throat-lozenges after rather steady and totally forbidden smoking. He had learned nothing except the placing of his voice. It had never seemed momentous to impress the nineteen students of oratory and the instructor, an unordained licensed preacher who had formerly been a tax-assessor in Oklahoma. He had, in Public Speaking, never been a failure nor ever for one second interesting.

Now, sweating very much, he perceived that he was expected to think, to articulate the curious desires whereby Elmer Gantry was slightly different from any other human being, and to rivet together opinions which would not be floated on any tide of hallelujahs.

He tried to remember the sermons he had heard. But the preachers had been so easily convinced of their authority as prelates, so freighted with ponderous messages, while himself, he was not at the moment certain whether he was a missionary who had to pass his surprising new light on to the multitude, or just a sinner who—

Just a sinner! For keeps! Nothing else! Damned if he’d welsh on old Jim! No,sir! Or welsh on Juanita, who’d stood for him and merely kidded him, no matter how soused and rough and mouthy he might be! . . . Her hug. The way she’d get rid of that buttinsky aunt of Nell’s; just wink at him and give Aunty some song and dance or other and send her out for chow—

God! If Juanita were only here! She’d give him the real dope. She’d advise him whether he ought to tell Prexy and the Y. M. to go to hell or grab this chance to show Eddie Fislinger and all those Y. M. highbrows that he wasn’t such a bonehead—

No! Here Prexy had said he was the whole cheese; gotten up a big meeting for him. Prexy Quarles and Juanita! Aber nit! Never get them two together! And Prexy had called on him—

Suppose it got into the newspapers! How he’d saved a tough kid, just as good as Judson Roberts could do. Juanita—find skirts like her any place, but where could they find a guy that could start in and save souls right off the bat?

Chuck all these fool thoughts, now that Jim was asleep, and figure out his spiel. What was that about sweating in the vineyard? Something like that, anyway. In the Bible. . . . However much they might rub it in—and no gink’d ever had a worse time, with that sneaking Eddie poking him on one side and Jim lambasting him on the other—whatever happened, he had to show those yahoos he could do just as good—

Hell! This wasn’t buying the baby any shoes; this wasn’t getting his spiel done. But—

What was the doggone thing to beabout?

Let’s see now. Gee, there was a bully thought! Tell ’em about how a strong husky guy, the huskier he was the more he could afford to admit that the power of the Holy Ghost had just laid him out cold—

No. Hell! That was what Old Jud had said. Must have something new—kinda new, anyway.

He shouldn’t say “hell.” Cut it out. Stay converted, no matter how hard it was.Hewasn’t afraid of— Him and Old Jud, they were husky enough to—

No, sir! It wasn’t Old Jud; it was his mother. What’d she think if she ever saw him with Juanita? Juanita! That sloppy brat! No modesty!

Had to get down to brass tacks. Now!

Elmer grasped the edge of his work-table. The top cracked. His strength pleased him. He pulled up his dingy red sweater, smoothed his huge biceps, and again tackled his apostolic labors:

Let’s see now: The fellows at the Y. would expect him to say—

He had it! Nobody ever amounted to a darn except as the—what was it?—as the inscrutable designs of Providence intended him to be.

Elmer was very busy making vast and unformed scrawls in a ten-cent note-book hitherto devoted to German. He darted up, looking scholarly, and gathered his library about him: his Bible, given to him by his mother; his New Testament, given by a Sunday School teacher; his text-books in Weekly Bible and Church History; and one-fourteenth of a fourteen-volume set of Great Orations of the World which, in a rare and alcoholic moment of bibliomania, he had purchased in Cato for seventeen cents. He piled them and repiled them and tapped them with his fountain-pen.

His original stimulus had run out entirely.

Well, he’d get help from the Bible. It was all inspired, every word, no matter what scoffers like Jim said. He’d take the first text he turned to and talk on that.

He opened on: “Nowtherefore, Tatnai, governor beyond the river, Shethar-boznai, and your companions the Apharsachites, whicharebeyond the river, be ye far from thence,” an injunction spirited but not at present helpful.

He returned to pulling his luxuriant hair and scratching.

Golly. Must be something.

The only way of putting it all over life was to understand these Forces that the scientists, with their laboratories and everything, couldn’t savvy, but to a real Christian they were just as easy as rolling off a log—

No. He hadn’t taken any lab courses except Chemistry I, so he couldn’t show where all these physicists and biologists were boobs.

Elmer forlornly began to cross out the lovely scrawls he had made in his note-book.

He was irritably conscious that Jim was awake, and scoffing:

“Having quite a time being holy and informative, Hell-cat? Why don’t you pinch your first sermon from the heathen? You won’t be the first up-and-coming young messiah to do it!”

Jim shied a thin book at him, and sank again into infidel sleep. Elmer picked up the book. It was a selection from the writings of Robert G. Ingersoll.

Elmer was indignant.

Take his speech from Ingersoll, that rotten old atheist that said—well, anyway, he criticized the Bible and everything! Fellow that couldn’t believe the Bible, least he could do was not to disturb the faith of others. Darn’ rotten thing to do! Fat nerve of Jim to suggest his pinching anything from Ingersoll! He’d throw the book in the fire!

But— Anything was better than going on straining his brains. He forgot his woes by drugging himself with heedless reading. He drowsed through page on page of Ingersoll’s rhetoric and jesting. Suddenly he sat up, looked suspiciously over at the silenced Jim, looked suspiciously at Heaven. He grunted, hesitated, and began rapidly to copy into the German note-book, from Ingersoll:

Love is the only bow on life’s dark cloud. It is the Morning and the Evening Star. It shines upon the cradle of the babe, and sheds its radiance upon the quiet tomb. It is the mother of Art, inspirer of poet, patriot and philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart, builder of every home, kindler of every fire on every hearth. It was the first to dream of immortality. It fills the world with melody, for Music is the voice of Love. Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to joy, and makes right royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the perfume of the wondrous flower—the heart—and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven and we are gods.

Only for a moment, while he was copying, did he look doubtful; then:

“Rats! Chances are nobody there tonight has ever read Ingersoll. Agin him. Besides I’ll kind of change it around.”

When President Quarles called for him, Elmer’s exhortation was outlined, and he had changed to his Sunday-best blue serge double-breasted suit and sleeked his hair.

As they departed, Jim called Elmer back from the hall to whisper, “Say, Hell-cat, you won’t forget to give credit to Ingersoll, and to me for tipping you off, will you?”

“You go to hell!” said Elmer.

There was a sizable and extremely curious gathering at the Y. M. C. A. All day the campus had debated, “Did Hell-cat really sure-enough get saved? Is he going to cut out his hell-raising?”

Every man he knew was present, their gaping mouths dripping question-marks, grinning or doubtful. Their leers confused him, and he was angry at being introduced by Eddie Fislinger, president of the Y. M. C. A.

He started coldly, stammering. But Ingersoll had provided the beginning of his discourse, and he warmed to the splendor of his own voice. He saw the audience in the curving Y. M. C. A. auditorium as a radiant cloud, and he began to boom confidently, he began to add to his outline impressive ideas which were altogether his own—except, perhaps, as he had heard them thirty or forty times in sermons.

It sounded very well, considering. Certainly it compared well with the average mystical rhapsody of the pulpit.

For all his slang, his cursing, his mauled plurals and singulars, Elmer had been compelled in college to read certain books, to hear certain lectures, all filled with flushed, florid polysyllables, with juicy sentiments about God, sunsets, the moral improvement inherent in a daily view of mountain scenery, angels, fishing for souls, fishing for fish, ideals, patriotism, democracy, purity, the error of Providence in creating the female leg, courage, humility, justice, the agricultural methods of Palestinecirc.4a. d., the beauty of domesticity, and preachers’ salaries. These blossoming words, these organ-like phrases, these profound notions, had been rammed home till they stuck in his brain, ready for use.

But even to the schoolboy-wearied faculty who had done the ramming, who ought to have seen the sources, it was still astonishing that after four years of grunting, Elmer Gantry should come out with these flourishes, which they took perfectly seriously, for they themselves had been nurtured in minute Baptist and Campbellite colleges.

Not one of them considered that there could be anything comic in the spectacle of a large young man, divinely fitted for coal-heaving, standing up and wallowing in thick slippery words about Love and the Soul. They sat—young instructors not long from the farm, professors pale from years of napping in unaired pastoral studies—and looked at Elmer respectfully as he throbbed:

“It’s awful’ hard for a fellow that’s more used to bucking the line than to talking publicly to express how he means, but sometimes I guess maybe you think about a lot of things even if you don’t always express how you mean, and I want to—what I want to talk about is how if a fellow looks down deep into things and is really square with God, and lets God fill his heart with higher aspirations, he sees that—he sees that Love is the one thing that can really sure-enough lighten all of life’s dark clouds.

“Yes, sir, just Love! It’s the morning and evening star. It’s—even in the quiet tomb, I mean those that are around the quiet tomb, you find it even there. What is it that inspires all great men, all poets and patriots and philosophers? It’s Love, isn’t it? What gave the world its first evidences of immortality? Love! It fills the world with melody, for what is music? What is music? Why!Music is the voice of Love!”

The great President Quarles leaned back and put on his spectacles, which gave a slight appearance of learning to his chin-whiskered countenance, otherwise that of a small-town banker in 1850. He was the center of a row of a dozen initiates on the platform of the Y. M. C. A. auditorium, a shallow platform under a plaster half-dome. The wall behind them was thick with diagrams, rather like anatomical charts, showing the winning of souls in Egypt, the amount spent on whisky versus the amount spent on hymn books, and the illustrated progress of a pilgrim from Unclean Speech through Cigarette Smoking and Beer Saloons to a lively situation in which he beat his wife, who seemed to dislike it. Above was a large and enlightening motto: “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.”

The whole place had that damp-straw odor characteristic of places of worship, but President Quarles did not, seemingly, suffer in it. All his life he had lived in tabernacles and in rooms devoted to thin church periodicals and thick volumes of sermons. He had a slight constant snuffle, but his organism was apparently adapted now to existing without air. He beamed and rubbed his hands, and looked with devout joy on Elmer’s long broad back as Elmer snapped into it, ever surer of himself; as he bellowed at the audience—beating them, breaking through their interference, making a touchdown:

“What is it makes us different from the animals? The passion of Love! Without it, we are—in fact we are nothing; with it, earth is heaven, and we are, I mean to some extent, like God himself! Now that’s what I wanted to explain about Love, and here’s how it applies. Prob’ly there’s a whole lot of you like myself—oh, I been doing it, I’m not going to spare myself—I been going along thinking I was too good, too big, too smart, for the divine love of the Savior! Say! Any of you ever stop and think how much you’re handing yourself when you figure you can get along without divine intercession? Say! I suppose prob’ly you’re bigger than Moses, bigger than St. Paul, bigger than Pastewer, that great scientist—”

President Quarles was exulting, “It was a genuine conversion! But more than that! Here’s a true discovery—my discovery! Elmer is a born preacher, once he lets himself go, and I can make him do it! O Lord, how mysterious are thy ways! Thou hast chosen to train our young brother not so much in prayer as in the mighty struggles of the Olympic field! I—thou, Lord, hast produced a born preacher. Some day he’ll be one of our leading prophets!”

The audience clapped when Elmer hammered out his conclusion: “—and you Freshmen will save a lot of the time that I wasted if you see right now that until you know God you know—just nothing!”

They clapped, they made their faces to shine upon him. Eddie Fislinger won him by sighing, “Old fellow, you got me beat at my own game like you have at your game!” There was much hand-shaking. None of it was more ardent than that of his recent enemy, the Latin professor, who breathed:

“Where did you get all those fine ideas and metaphors about the Divine Love, Gantry?”

“Oh,” modestly, “I can’t hardly call them mine, Professor. I guess I just got them by praying.”

Judson Roberts, ex-football-star, state secretary of the Y. M. C. A., was on the train to Concordia, Kansas. In the vestibule he had three puffs of an illegal cigarette and crushed it out.

“No, really, it wasn’t so bad for him, that Elmer what’s-his-name, to get converted. Suppose thereisn’tanything to it. Won’t hurt him to cut out some of his bad habits for a while, anyway. And how do we know? Maybe the Holy Ghost does come down. No more improbable than electricity. I do wish I could get over this doubting! I forget it when I’ve got ’em going in an evangelistic meeting, but when I watch a big butcher like him, with that damn’ silly smirk on his jowls—I believe I’ll go into the real estate business. I don’t think I’m hurting these young fellows any, but I do wish I could be honest. Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy, I wish I had a good job selling real estate!”

Elmer walked home firmly. “Just what right has Mr. James B. Lefferts got to tell me I mustn’t use my ability to get a crowd going? And I certainly had ’em going! Never knew I could spiel like that. Easy as feetball! And Prexy saying I was a born preacher! Huh!”

Firmly and resentfully he came into their room, and slammed down his hat.

It awoke Jim. “How’d it go over? Hand ’em out the gospel guff?”

“I did!” Elmer trumpeted. “It went over, as you put it, corking. Got any objections?”

He lighted the largest lamp and turned it up full, his back to Jim.

No answer. When he looked about, Jim seemed asleep.

At seven next morning he said forgivingly, rather patronizingly, “I’ll be gone till ten—bring you back some breakfast?”

Jim answered, “No, thanks,” and those were his only words that morning.

When Elmer came in at ten-thirty, Jim was gone, his possessions gone. (It was no great moving: three suit-cases of clothes, an armful of books.) There was a note on the table:

I shall live at the College Inn the rest of this year. You can probably get Eddie Fislinger to live with you. You would enjoy it. It has been stimulating to watch you try to be an honest roughneck, but I think it would be almost too stimulating to watch you become a spiritual leader.J. B. L.

J. B. L.

All of Elmer’s raging did not make the room seem less lonely.

CHAPTER IV

president quarlesurged him.

Elmer would, perhaps, affect the whole world if he became a minister. What glory for Old Terwillinger and all the shrines of Gritzmacher Springs!

Eddie Fislinger urged him.

“Jiminy! You’d go way beyond me! I can see you president of the Baptist convention!” Elmer still did not like Eddie, but he was making much now of ignoring Jim Lefferts (they met on the street and bowed ferociously), and he had to have some one to play valet to his virtues.

The ex-minister dean of the college urged him.

Where could Elmer find a profession with a better social position than the ministry—thousands listening to him—invited to banquets and everything. So much easier than— Well, not exactly easier; all ministers worked arduously—great sacrifices—constant demands on their sympathy—heroic struggle against vice—but same time, elegant and superior work, surrounded by books, high thoughts, and the finest ladies in the city or country as the case might be. And cheaper professional training than law. With scholarships and outside preaching, Elmer could get through the three years of Mizpah Theological Seminary on almost nothing a year. What other planshadhe for a career? Nothing definite? Why, looked like divine intervention; certainly did; let’s call it settled. Perhaps he could get Elmer a scholarship the very first year—

His mother urged him.

She wrote, daily, that she was longing, praying, sobbing—

Elmer urged himself.

He had no prospects except the chance of reading law in the dingy office of a cousin in Toluca, Kansas. The only things he had against the ministry, now that he was delivered from Jim, were the low salaries and the fact that if ministers were caught drinking or flirting, it was often very hard on them. The salaries weren’t so bad—he’d go to the top, of course, and maybe make eight or ten thousand. But the diversions— He thought about it so much that he made a hasty trip to Cato, and came back temporarily cured forever of any desire for wickedness.

The greatest urge was his memory of holding his audience, playing on them. To move people— Golly! He wanted to be addressing somebody on something right now, and being applauded!

By this time he was so rehearsed in his rôle of candidate for righteousness that it didn’t bother him (so long as no snickering Jim was present) to use the most embarrassing theological and moral terms in the presence of Eddie or the president; and without one grin he rolled out dramatic speeches about “the duty of every man to lead every other man to Christ,” and “the historic position of the Baptists as the one true Scriptural Church, practising immersion, as taught by Christ himself.”

He was persuaded. He saw himself as a white-browed and star-eyed young evangel, wearing a new frock coat, standing up in a pulpit and causing hundreds of beautiful women to weep with conviction and rush down to clasp his hand.

But there was one barrier, extremely serious. They all informed him that select though he was as sacred material, before he decided he must have a mystic experience known as a Call. God himself must appear and call him to service, and conscious though Elmer was now of his own powers and the excellence of the church, he saw no more of God about the place than in his worst days of unregeneracy.

He asked the president and the dean if they had had a Call. Oh, yes, certainly; but they were vague about practical tips as to how to invite a Call and recognize it when it came. He was reluctant to ask Eddie—Eddie would be only too profuse with tips, and want to kneel down and pray with him, and generally be rather damp and excitable and messy.

The Call did not come, not for weeks, with Easter past and no decision as to what he was going to do next year.

Spring on the prairie, high spring. Lilacs masked the speckled brick and stucco of the college buildings, spiræa made a flashing wall, and from the Kansas fields came soft airs and the whistle of meadow larks.

Students loafed at their windows, calling down to friends; they played catch on the campus; they went bareheaded and wrote a great deal of poetry; and the Terwillinger baseball team defeated Fogelquist College.

Still Elmer did not receive his divine Call.

By day, playing catch, kicking up his heels, belaboring his acquaintances, singing “The happiest days that ever were, we knew at old Terwillinger” on a fence fondly believed to resemble the Yale fence, or tramping by himself through the minute forest of cottonwood and willow by Tunker Creek, he expanded with the expanding year and knew happiness.

The nights were unadulterated hell.

He felt guilty that he had no Call, and he went to the president about it in mid-May.

Dr. Quarles was thoughtful, and announced:

“Brother Elmer, the last thing I’d ever want to do, in fairness to the spirit of the ministry, would be to create an illusion of a Call when there was none present. That would be like the pagan hallucinations worked on the poor suffering followers of Roman Catholicism. Whatever else he may be, a Baptist preacher must be free from illusions; he must found his work on good hard scientificfacts—the proven facts of the Bible, and substitutionary atonement, which even pragmatically we know to be true, because it works. No, no! But at the same time I feel sure the voice of God is calling you, if you can but hear it, and I want to help you lift the veil of worldliness which still, no doubt, deafens your inner ear. Will you come to my house tomorrow evening? We’ll take the matter to the Lord in prayer.”

It was all rather dreadful.

That kindly spring evening, with a breeze fresh in the branches of the sycamores, President Quarles had shut the windows and drawn the blinds in his living-room, an apartment filled with crayon portraits of Baptist worthies, red-plush chairs, and leaded-glass unit bookcases containing the lay writings of the more poetic clergy. The president had gathered as assistants in prayer the more aged and fundamentalist ex-pastors on the faculty and the more milky and elocutionary of the Y. M. C. A. leaders, headed by Eddie Fislinger.

When Elmer entered, they were on their knees, their arms on the seats of reversed chairs, their heads bowed, all praying aloud and together. They looked up at him like old women surveying the bride. He wanted to bolt. Then the president nabbed him, and had him down on his knees, suffering and embarrassed and wondering what the devil to pray about.

They took turns at telling God what he ought to do in the case of “our so ardently and earnestly seeking brother.”

“Now will you lift your voice in prayer, Brother Elmer? Just let yourself go. Remember we’re all with you, all loving and helping you,” grated the president.

They crowded near him. The president put his stiff old arm about Elmer’s shoulder. It felt like a dry bone, and the president smelled of kerosene. Eddie crowded up on the other side and nuzzled against him. The others crept in, patting him. It was horribly hot in that room, and they were so close—he felt as if he were tied down in a hospital ward. He looked up and saw the long shaven face, the thin tight lips, of a minister . . . whom he was now to emulate.

He prickled with horror, but he tried to pray. He wailed, “O blessed Lord, help me to—help me to—”

He had an enormous idea. He sprang up. He cried, “Say, I think the spirit is beginning to work and maybe if I just went out and took a short walk and kinda prayed by myself, while you stayed here and prayed for me, it might help.”

“I don’t think that would be the way,” began the president, but the most aged faculty-member suggested, “Maybe it’s the Lord’s guidance. We hadn’t ought to interfere with the Lord’s guidance, Brother Quarles.”

“That’s so, that’s so,” the president announced. “You have your walk, Brother Elmer, and pray hard, and we’ll stay here and besiege the throne of grace for you.”

Elmer blundered out into the fresh clean air.

Whatever happened, he was never going back! How he hated their soft, crawly, wet hands!

He had notions of catching the last train to Cato and getting solacingly drunk. No. He’d lose his degree, just a month off now, and be cramped later in appearing as a real, high-class, college-educated lawyer.

Lose it, then! Anything but go back to their crawling creepy hands, their aged breathing by his ear—

He’d get hold of somebody and say he felt sick and send him back to tell Prexy and sneak off to bed. Cinch! He just wouldn’t get his Call, just pass it up, by Jiminy, and not have to go into the ministry.

But to lose the chance to stand before thousands and stir them by telling about divine love and the evening and morning star—If he could just stand it till he got through theological seminary and was on the job— Then, if any Eddie Fislinger tried to come into his study and breathe down his neck—throw him out, by golly!

He was conscious that he was leaning against a tree, tearing down twigs, and that facing him under a street-lamp was Jim Lefferts.

“You look sick, Hell-cat,” said Jim.

Elmer strove for dignity, then broke, with a moaning, “Oh, I am! What did I ever get into this religious fix for?”

“What they doing to you? Never mind; don’t tell me. You need a drink.”

“By God, I do!”

“I’ve got a quart of first-rate corn whisky from a moon-shiner I’ve dug up out here in the country, and my room’s right in this block. Come along.”

Through his first drink, Elmer was quiet, bewildered, vaguely leaning on the Jim who would guide him away from this horror.

But he was out of practice in drinking, and the whisky took hold with speed. By the middle of the second glass he was boasting of his ecclesiastical eloquence, he was permitting Jim to know that never in Terwillinger College had there appeared so promising an orator, that right now they were there praying for him, waiting for him, the president and the whole outfit!

“But,” with a slight return of apology, “I suppose prob’ly you think maybe I hadn’t ought to go back to ’em.”

Jim was standing by the open window, saying slowly, “No. I think now— You’d better go back. I’ve got some peppermints. They’ll fix your breath, more or less. Good-by, Hell-cat.”

He had won even over old Jim!

He was master of the world, and only a very little bit drunk.

He stepped out high and happy. Everything was extremely beautiful. How high the trees were! What a wonderful drug-store window, with all those glossy new magazine covers! That distant piano—magic. What exquisite young women the co-eds! What lovable and sturdy men the students! He was at peace with everything. What a really good fellow he was! He’d lost all his meannesses. How kind he’d been to that poor lonely sinner, Jim Lefferts. Others might despair of Jim’s soul—he never would.

Poor old Jim. His room had looked terrible—that narrow little room with a cot, all in disorder, a pair of shoes and a corncob pipe lying on a pile of books. Poor Jim. He’d forgive him. Go around and clean up the room for him.

(Not that Elmer had ever cleaned up their former room.)

Gee, what a lovely spring night! How corking those old boys were, Prexy and everybody, to give up an evening and pray for him!

Why was it he felt so fine? Of course! The Call had come! God had come to him, though just spiritually, not corporeally, so far as he remembered. It had come! He could go ahead and rule the world!

He dashed into the president’s house; he shouted from the door, erect, while they knelt and looked up at him mousily, “It’s come! I feel it in everything! God just opened my eyes and made me feel what a wonderful ole world it is, and it was just like I could hear his voice saying, ‘Don’t you want to love everybody and help them to be happy? Do you want to just go along being selfish, or have you got a longing to—to help everybody?’ ”

He stopped. They had listened silently, with interested grunts of “Amen, Brother.”

“Honest, it was awful’ impressive. Somehow, something has made me feel so much better than when I went away from here. I’m sure it was a real Call. Don’t you think so, President?”

“Oh, I’m sure of it!” the president ejaculated, getting up hastily and rubbing his knees.

“I feel that all is right with our brother; that he has now, this sacred moment, heard the voice of God, and is entering upon the highest calling in the sight of God,” the president observed to the dean. “Don’t you feel so?”

“God be praised,” said the dean, and looked at his watch.

On their way home, they two alone, the oldest faculty-member said to the dean, “Yes, it was a fine gratifying moment. And—herumph!—slightly surprising. I’d hardly thought that young Gantry would go on being content with the mild blisses of salvation. Herumph! Curious smell of peppermint he had about him.”

“I suppose he stopped at the drug-store during his walk and had a soft-drink of some kind. Don’t know, Brother,” said the dean, “that I approve of these soft drinks. Innocent in themselves, but they might lead to carelessness in beverages; A man who drinks ginger ale—how are you going to impress on him the terrible danger of drinkingale?”

“Yes, yes,” said the oldest faculty-member (he was sixty-eight, to the dean’s boyish sixty). “Say, Brother, how do you feel about young Gantry? About his entering the ministry? I know you did well in the pulpit before you came here, as I more or less did myself, but if you were a boy of twenty-one or -two, do you think you’d become a preacher now, way things are?”

“Why, Brother!” grieved the dean. “Certainly I would! What a question! What would become of all our work at Terwillinger, all our ideals in opposition to the heathenish large universities, if the ministry weren’t the highest ideal—”

“I know. I know. I just wonder sometimes— All the new vocations that are coming up. Medicine. Advertising. World just going it! I tell you, Dean, in another forty years, by 1943, men will be up in the air in flying machines, going maybe a hundred miles an hour!”

“My dear fellow, if the Lord had meant men to fly, he’d have given us wings.”

“But there are prophecies in the Book—”

“Those refer purely to spiritual and symbolic flying. No, no! Never does to oppose the clear purpose of the Bible, and I could dig you out a hundred texts that show unquestionably that the Lord intends us to stay right here on earth till that day when we shall be upraised in the body with him.”

“Herumph! Maybe. Well, here’s my corner. Good night, Brother.”

The dean came into his house. It was a small house.

“How’d it go?” asked his wife.

“Splendid. Young Gantry seemed to feel an unmistakable divine call. Something struck him that just uplifted him. He’s got a lot of power. Only—”

The dean irritably sat down in a cane-seated rocker, jerked off his shoes, grunted, drew on his slippers.

“Only, hang it, I simply can’t get myself to like him! Emma, tell me: If I were his age now, do you think I’d go into the ministry, as things are today?”

“Why, Henry! What in the world ever makes you say a thing like that? Of course you would! Why, if that weren’t the case— What would our whole lives mean, all we’ve given up and everything?”

“Oh, I know. I just get to thinking. Sometimes I wonder if we’ve given up so much. Don’t hurt even a preacher to face himself! After all, those two years when I was in the carpet business, before I went to the seminary, I didn’t do very well. Maybe I wouldn’t have made any more than I do now. But if I could— Suppose I could’ve been a great chemist? Wouldn’t that (mind you, I’m just speculating, as a student of psychology)—wouldn’t that conceivably be better than year after year of students with the same confounded problems over and over again—and always so pleased and surprised and important about them!—or year after year again of standing in the pulpit and knowing your congregation don’t remember what you’ve said seven minutes after you’ve said it?”

“Why, Henry, I don’t know what’s gotten into you! I think you better do a little praying yourself instead of picking on this poor young Gantry! Neither you nor I could ever have been happy except in a Baptist church or a real cover-to-cover Baptist college.”

The dean’s wife finished darning the towels and went up to say good-night to her parents.

They had lived with her since her father’s retirement, at seventy-five, from his country pastorate. He had been a missionary in Missouri before the Civil War.

Her lips had been moving, her eyebrows working, as she darned the towels; her eyebrows were still creased as she came into their room and shrieked at her father’s deafness:

“Time to go to bed, Papa. And you, Mama.”

They were nodding on either side of a radiator unheated for months.

“All right, Emmy,” piped the ancient.

“Say, Papa— Tell me: I’ve been thinking: If you were just a young man today, would you go into the ministry?”

“Course I would! What an idea! Most glorious vocation young man could have. Idea! G’night, Emmy!”

But as his ancient wife sighingly removed her corsets, she complained, “Don’t know as you would or not—if I was married to you—which ain’t any too certain, a second time—and if I had anything to say about it!”

“Whichiscertain! Don’t be foolish. Course I would.”

“I don’t know. Fifty years I had of it, and I never did get so I wa’n’t just mad clear through when the ladies of the church came poking around, criticizing me for every little tidy I put on the chairs, and talking something terrible if I had a bonnet or a shawl that was the least mite tasty. ‘ ’Twa’n’t suitable for a minister’s wife.’ Drat ’em! And I always did like a bonnet with some nice bright colors. Oh, I’ve done a right smart of thinking about it. You always were a powerful preacher, but’s I’ve told you—”

“You have!”

“—I never could make out how, if when you were in the pulpit you really knew so much about all these high and mighty and mysterious things, how it was when you got home you never knew enough, and you never could learn enough, to find the hammer or make a nice piece of corn-bread or add up a column of figures twice alike or find Oberammergau on the map of Austria!”

“Germany, woman! I’m sleepy!”

“And all these years of having to pretend to be so good when we were just common folks all the time! Ain’t you glad you can just be simple folks now?”

“Maybe it is restful. But that’s not saying I wouldn’t do it over again.” The old man ruminated a long while. “I think I would. Anyway, no use discouraging these young people from entering the ministry. Somebody got to preach the gospel truth, ain’t they?”

“I suppose so. Oh, dear. Fifty years since I married a preacher! And if I could still only be sure about the virgin birth! Now don’t you go explaining! Laws, the number of times you’ve explained! I know it’s true—it’s in the Bible. If I could onlybelieveit! But—

“I would of liked to had you try your hand at politics. If I could of been, just once, to a senator’s house, to a banquet or something, just once, in a nice bright red dress with gold slippers, I’d of been willing to go back to alpaca and scrubbing floors and listening to you rehearsing your sermons, out in the stable, to that old mare we had for so many years—oh, laws, how long is it she’s been dead now? Must be—yes, it’s twenty-seven years—

“Why is it that it’s only in religion that the things you got to believe are agin all experience? Now drat it, don’t you go and quote that ‘I believe because it is impossible’ thing at me again! Believe because it’s impossible! Huh! Just like a minister!

“Oh, dear, I hope I don’t live long enough to lose my faith. Seems like the older I get, the less I’m excited over all these preachers that talk about hell only they never saw it.

“Twenty-seven years! And we had that old hoss so long before that. My how she could kick— Busted that buggy—”

They were both asleep.

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