When Elmer descended from the train in Lincoln Friday afternoon, he stopped before a red-and-black poster announcing that Elmer Gantry was a power in the machinery world, that he was an eloquent and entertaining speaker, and that his address “Increasing Sales with God and the Gideons” would be a “revelation of the new world of better business.”
“Jiminy!” said the power in the machinery world. “I’d rather see a sermon of mine advertised like that than sell steen million plows!”
He had a vision of Sharon Falconer in her suite in late afternoon, lonely and clinging in the faded golden light, clinging to him. But when he reached her room by telephone she was curt. “No, no, sorry, can’t see you ’safternoon—see you at dinner, quarter to six.”
He was so chastened that he was restrained and uncommenting when she came swooping into the dining-room, a knot-browed, efficient, raging Sharon, and when he found that she had brought Cecil Aylston.
“Good evening, Sister—Brother Aylston,” he boomed sedately.
“Evening. Ready to speak?”
“Absolutely.”
She lighted a little. “That’s good. Everything else’s gone wrong, and these preachers here think I can travel an evangelistic crew on air. Give ’em fits about tight-wad Christian business men, will you, Elmer? How they hate to loosen up! Cecil! Kindly don’t look as if I’d bitten somebody. I haven’t . . . not yet.”
Aylston ignored her, and the two men watched each other like a panther and a buffalo (but a buffalo with a clean shave and ever so much scented hair-tonic).
“Brother Aylston,” said Elmer, “I noticed in the account of last evening’s meeting that you spoke of Mary and the anointing with spikenard, and you quoted these ‘Idylls of the King,’ by Tennyson. Or that’s what the newspaper said.”
“That’s right.”
“But do you think that’s good stuff for evangelism? All right for a regular church, especially with a high-class rich congregation, but in a soul-saving campaign—”
“My dear Mr. Gantry, Miss Falconer and I have decided that even in the most aggressive campaign there is no need of vulgarizing our followers.”
“Well, that isn’t what I’d give ’em!”
“And what, pray, would you give them?”
“The good old-fashioned hell, that’s what!” Elmer peeped at Sharon, and felt that she was smiling with encouragement. “Yes-sir, like the hymn says, the hell of our fathers is good enough for me.”
“Quite so! I’m afraid it isn’t good enough for me, and I don’t know that Jesus fancied it particularly!”
“Well, you can be dead sure of one thing: When he stayed with Mary and Martha and Lazarus, he didn’t loaf around drinking tea with ’em!”
“Why not, my dear man! Don’t you know that tea was first imported by caravan train from Ceylon to Syria in 627 B. C.?
“No-o, didn’t know just when—”
“Why, of course. You’ve merely forgotten it—you must have read in your university days of the great epicurean expedition of Phthaltazar—when he took the eleven hundred camels? Psaltazar? You remember!”
“Oh, yes, I remember his expedition, but I didn’t know he brought in tea.”
“Why, naturally! Rather! Uh, Miss Falconer, the impetuous Mr. Shoop wants to sing ‘Just As I Am’ for his solo tonight. Is there any way of preventing it? Adelbert is a good saved soul, but just as he is, he is too fat. Won’t you speak to him?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Let him sing it. He’s brought in lots of souls on that,” yawned Sharon.
“Mangy little souls.”
“Oh, stop being so supercilious! When you get to heaven, Cecil, you’ll complain of the way the seraphims—oh, do shut up; Iknowit’s seraphim, my tongue just slipped—you’ll complain of the kind of corsets they wear.”
“I’m not at all sure but that you really do picture that sort of heaven, with corseted angels and yourself with a golden mansion on the celestial Park Lane!”
“Cecil Aylston, don’t you quarrel with me tonight! I feel—vulgar! That’s your favorite word! I do wish I could save some of the members of my own crew! . . . Elmer, do you think God went to Oxford?”
“Sure!”
“And you did, of course!”
“I did not, by golly! I went to a hick college in Kansas! And I was born in a hick town in Kansas!”
“Me too, practically! Oh, I did come from a frightfully old Virginia family, and I was born in what they called a mansion, but still, we were so poor that our pride was ridiculous. Tell me: did you split wood and pull mustard when you were a boy?”
“Did I? Say! You bet I did!”
They sat with their elbows on the table, swapping boasts of provincial poverty, proclaiming kinship, while Cecil looked frosty.
Elmer’s speech at the evangelistic meeting was a cloudburst.
It had structure as well as barytone melody, choice words, fascinating anecdotes, select sentiment, chaste point of view, and resolute piety.
Elmer was later to explain to admirers of his public utterances that nothing was more important than structure. What, he put it to them, would they think of an architect who was fancy about paint and clapboards but didn’t plan the house? And tonight’s euphuisms were full of structure.
In part one he admitted that despite his commercial success he had fallen into sin before the hour when, restless in his hotel room, he had idly fingered o’er a Gideon Bible and been struck by the parable of the talents.
In part two he revealed by stimulating examples from his own experience the cash value of Christianity. He pointed out that merchants often preferred a dependable man to a known crook.
Hitherto he had, perhaps, been a shade too realistic. He felt that Sharon would never take him on in place of Cecil Aylston unless she perceived the poetry with which his soul was gushing. So in part three he explained that what made Christianity no mere dream and ideal, but a practical human solvent, was Love. He spoke very nicely of Love. He said that Love was the Morning Star, the Evening Star, the Radiance upon the Quiet Tomb, the Inspirer equally of Patriots and Bank Presidents, and as for Music, what was it but the very voice of Love?
He had elevated his audience (thirteen hundred they were, and respectful) to a height of idealism from which he made them swoop now like eagles to a pool of tears:
“For, oh, my brothers and sisters, important though it is to be prudent in this world’s affairs, it is the world to come that is alone important, and this reminds me, in closing, of a very sad incident which I recently witnessed. In business affairs I had often had to deal with a very prominent man named Jim Leff—Leffingwell. I can give his name now because he has passed to his eternal reward. Old Jim was the best of good fellows, but he had fatal defects. He drank liquor, he smoked tobacco, he gambled, and I’m sorry to say that he did not always keep his tongue clean—he took the name of God in vain. But Jim was very fond of his family, particularly of his little daughter. Well, she took sick. Oh, what a sad time that was to that household! How the stricken mother tiptoed into and out of the sick-room; how the worried doctors came and went, speeding to aid her! As for the father, poor old Jim, he was bowed with anguish as he leaned over that pathetic little bed, and his hair turned gray in a single night. There came the great crisis, and before the very eyes of the weeping father that little form was stilled, and that sweet, pure, young soul passed to its Maker.
“He came to me sobbing, and I put my arms round him as I would round a little child. ‘Oh, God,’ he sobbed, ‘that I should have spent my life in wicked vices, and that the little one should have passed away knowing her dad was a sinner!’ Thinking to comfort him, I said, ‘Old man, it was God’s will that she be taken. You have done all that mortal man could do. The best of medical attention. The best of care.’
“I shall never forget how scornfully he turned upon me. ‘And you call yourself a Christian!’ he cried. ‘Yes, she had medical attention, but one thing was lacking—the one thing that would have saved her—I could not pray!’
“And that strong man knelt in anguish and for all my training in—in trying to explain the ways of God to my fellow business men, there was nothing to say.It was too late!
“Oh, my brothers, my fellow business men, areyougoing to put off repentance till it’s too late? That’syouraffair, you say. Is it? Is it? Have you a right to inflict upon all that you hold nearest and dearest the sore burden of your sins? Do you love your sins better than that dear little son, that bonnie daughter, that loving brother, that fine old father? Do you want to punish them? Do you? Don’t you love some one more than you do your sins? If you do, stand up. Isn’t there some one here who wants to stand up and help a fellow business man carry this gospel of great joy to the world? Won’t you come? Won’t youhelpme? Oh, come! Come down and let me shake your hand!”
And they came, dozens of them, weeping, while he wept at his own goodness.
They stood afterward in the secluded space behind the white-and-gold platforms, Sharon and Elmer, and she cried, “Oh, it was beautiful! Honestly, I almost cried myself! Elmer, it was just fine!”
“Didn’t I get ’em? Didn’t I get ’em? Didn’t I? Say, Sharon, I’m so glad it went over, because it was your show and I wanted to give you all I could!”
He moved toward her, his arms out, and for once he was not producing the false ardor of amorous diplomacy. He was the small boy seeking the praise of his mother. But she moved away from him, begging, not sardonically:
“No! Please!”
“But you do like me?”
“Yes, I do.”
“How much?”
“Not very much. I can’t like any one very much. But I do like you. Some day I might fall in love with you. A tiny bit. If you don’t rush me too much. But only physically. No one,” proudly, “can touch my soul!”
“Do you think that’s decent? Isn’t that sin?”
She flamed at him. “I can’t sin! I am above sin! I am really and truly sanctified! Whatever I may choose to do, though it might be sin in one unsanctified, with me God will turn it to his glory. I can kiss you like this—” Quickly she touched his cheek, “yes, or passionately, terribly passionately, and it would only symbolize my complete union with Jesus! I have told you a mystery. You can never understand. But you can serve me. Would you like to?”
“Yes, I would. . . . And I’ve never served anybody yet! Can I? Oh, kick out this tea-drinking mollycoddle, Cecil, and let me work with you. Don’t you need arms like these about you, just now and then, defending you?”
“Perhaps. But I’m not to be hurried. I am I! It is I who choose!”
“Yes. I guess prob’ly it is, Sharon. I think you’ve plumb hypnotized me or something.”
“No, but perhaps I shall if I ever care to. . . . I can do anything I want to! God chose me to do his work. I am the reincarnation of Joan of Arc, of Catherine of Sienna! I have visions! God talks to me! I told you once, that I hadn’t the brains to rival the men evangelists. Lies! False modesty! They are God’s message, but I am God’s right hand!”
She chanted it with her head back, her eyes closed, and even while he quaked, “My God, she’s crazy!” he did not care. He would give up all to follow her. Mumblingly he told her so, but she sent him away, and he crept off in a humility he had never known.
CHAPTER XII
twomore series of meetings Sharon Falconer held that summer, and at each of them the power in the machinery world appeared and chronicled his conversion by the Gideon Bible and the eloquence of Sister Falconer.
Sometimes he seemed very near her; the next time she would regard him with bleak china eyes. Once she turned on him with: “You smoke, don’t you?”
“Why, yes.”
“I smelled it. I hate it. Will you stop it? Entirely? And drinking?”
“Yes. I will.”
And he did. It was an agony of restlessness and craving, but he never touched alcohol or tobacco again, and he really regretted that in evenings thus made vacuous he could not keep from an interest in waitresses.
It was late in August, in a small Colorado city, after the second of his appearances as a saved financial Titan, that he implored Sharon as they entered the hotel together, “Oh, let me come up to your room. Please! I never have a chance to just sit and talk to you.”
“Very well. Come in half an hour. Don’t ’phone. Just come right up to Suite B.”
It was a half-hour of palpitating, of almost timorous, expectancy.
In every city where she held meetings Sharon was invited to stay at the home of one of the elect, but she always refused. She had a long standard explanation that “she could devote herself more fully to the prayer life if she had her own place, and day by day filled it more richly with the aura of spirituality.” Elmer wondered whether it wasn’t the aura of Cecil Aylston for which she had her suite, but he tried to keep his aching imagination away from that.
The half-hour was over.
He swayed up-stairs to Suite B and knocked. A distant “Come in.”
She was in the bedroom beyond. He inched into the stale hotel parlor—wallpaper with two-foot roses, a table with an atrocious knobby gilt vase, two stiff chairs and a grudging settee ranged round the wall. The lilies which her disciples had sent her were decaying in boxes, in a wash-bowl, in a heap in the corner. Round a china cuspidor lay faint rose petals.
He sat awkwardly on the edge of one of the chairs. He dared not venture beyond the dusty brocade curtains which separated the two rooms, but his fancy ventured fast enough.
She threw open the curtains and stood there, a flame blasting the faded apartment. She had discarded her white robe for a dressing-gown of scarlet with sleeves of cloth of gold—gold and scarlet; riotous black hair; long, pale, white face. She slipped over to the settee, and summoned him, “Come!”
He diffidently dropped his arm about her, and her head was on his shoulder. His arm drew tighter. But, “Oh, don’t make love to me,” she sighed, not moving. “You’ll know it all right when I want you to! Just be nice and comforting tonight.”
“But I can’t always—”
“I know. Perhaps you won’t always have to. Perhaps! Oh, I need—— What I need tonight is some salve for my vanity. Have I ever said that I was a reincarnated Joan of Arc? I really do half believe that sometimes. Of course it’s just insanity. Actually I’m a very ignorant young woman with a lot of misdirected energy and some tiny idealism. I preach elegant sermons for six weeks, but if I stayed in a town six weeks and one day, I’d have to start the music box over again. I can talk my sermons beautifully . . . but Cecil wrote most of ’em for me, and the rest I cheerfully stole.”
“Do you like Cecil?”
“Oh, is a nice, jealous, big, fat man!” She who that evening had been a disturbing organ note was lisping baby-talk now.
“Damn it, Sharon, don’t try to be a baby when I’m serious!”
“Damn it, Elmer, don’t say ‘damn it’! Oh, I hate the little vices—smoking, swearing, scandal, drinking just enough to be silly. I love the big ones—murder, lust, cruelty, ambition!”
“And Cecil? Is he one of the big vices that you love?”
“Oh, he’s a dear boy. So sweet, the way he takes himself seriously.”
“Yes, he must make love like an ice-cream cone.”
“You might be surprised! There, there! The poor man is just longing to have me say something mean about Cecil! I’ll be obliging. He’s done a lot for me. He really knows something; he isn’t a splendid cast-iron statue of ignorance like you or me.”
“Now you look here, Sharon! After all, Iama college graduate and practically a B. D. too.”
“That’s what I said. Cecil really knows how to read. And he taught me to quit acting like a hired girl, bless him. But— Oh, I’ve learned everything he can teach me, and if I get any more of the highbrow in me I’ll lose touch with the common people—bless their dear, sweet, honest souls!”
“Chuck him. Take me on. Oh, it isn’t the money. You must know that, dear. In ten years, at thirty-eight, I can be sales-manager of the Pequot—prob’ly ten thousand a year—and maybe some day the president, at thirty thou. I’m not looking for a job. But—— Oh, I’m crazy about you! Except for my mother, you’re the only person I’ve ever adored. I love you! Hear me? Damn it—yes, damn it, I said—I worship you! Oh, Sharon, Sharon, Sharon! It wasn’t really bunk when I told ’em all tonight how you’d converted me, because youdidconvert me. Will you let me serve you? And will you maybe marry me?”
“No. I don’t think I’ll ever marry—exactly. Perhaps I’ll chuck Cecil—poor sweet lad!—and take you on. I’ll see. Anyhow— Let me think.”
She shook off his encircling arm and sat brooding, chin on hand. He sat at her feet—spiritually as well as physically.
She beatified him with:
“In September I’ll have only four weeks of meetings, at Vincennes. I’m going to take off all October, before my winter work (you won’t know me then—I’mdandy, speaking indoors, in big halls!), and I’m going down to our home, the old Falconer family place, in Virginia. Pappy and Mam are dead now, and I own it. Old plantation. Would you like to come down there with me, just us two, for a fortnight in October?”
“Would I? My God!”
“Could you get away?”
“If it cost me my job!”
“Then—— I’ll wire you when to come after I get there: Hanning Hall, Broughton, Virginia. Now I think I’d better go to bed, dear. Sweet dreams.”
“Can’t I tuck you into bed?”
“No, dear. I might forget to be Sister Falconer! Good night!”
Her kiss was like a swallow’s flight, and he went out obediently, marveling that Elmer Gantry could for once love so much that he did not insist on loving.
In New York he had bought a suit of Irish homespun and a heather cap. He looked bulky but pleasantly pastoral as he gaped romantically from the Pullman window at the fields of Virginia. “Ole Virginny—ole Virginny” he hummed happily. Worm fences, negro cabins, gallant horses in rocky pastures, a longing to see the gentry who rode such horses, and ever the blue hills. It was an older world than his baking Kansas, older than Mizpah Seminary, and he felt a desire to be part of this traditional age to which Sharon belonged. Then, as the miles which still separated him from the town of Broughton crept back of him, he forgot the warm-tinted land in anticipation of her.
He was recalling that she was the aristocrat, the more formidable here in the company of F. F. V. friends. He was more than usually timid . . . and more than usually proud of his conquest.
For a moment, at the station, he thought that she had not come to meet him. Then he saw a girl standing by an old country buggy.
She was young, veritably a girl, in middy blouse deep cut at the throat, pleated white skirt, white shoes. Her red tam-o’-shanter was rakish, her smile was a country grin as she waved to him. And the girl was Sister Falconer.
“God, you’re adorable!” he murmured to her, as he plumped down his suit-case, and she was fragrant and soft in his arms as he kissed her.
“No more,” she whispered. “You’re supposed to be my cousin, and even very nice cousins don’t kiss quite so intelligently!”
As the carriage jerked across the hills, as the harness creaked and the white horse grunted, he held her hand lightly in butterfly ecstasy.
He cried out at the sight of Hanning Hall as they drove through the dark pines, among shabby grass plots, to the bare sloping lawn. It was out of a story-book; a brick house, not very large, with tall white pillars, white cupola, and dormer windows with tiny panes; and across the lawn paraded a peacock in the sun. Out of a story-book, too, was the pair of old negroes who bowed to them from the porch and hastened down the steps—the butler with green tail-coat and white mustache almost encircling his mouth, and the mammy in green calico, with an enormous grin and a histrionic curtsy.
“They’ve always cared for me since I was a tiny baby,” Sharon whispered. “I do love them—I do love this dear old place. That’s—” She hesitated, then defiantly: “That’s why I brought you here!”
The butler took his bag up and unpacked, while Elmer wandered about the old bedroom, impressed, softly happy. The wall was a series of pale landscapes: manor houses beyond avenues of elms. The bed was a four-poster; the fireplace of white-enameled posts and mantel; and on the broad oak boards of the floor, polished by generations of forgotten feet, were hooked rugs of the days of crinoline.
“Golly, I’m so happy! I’ve come home!” sighed Elmer.
When the butler was gone, Elmer drifted to the window, and “Golly!” he said again. He had not realized that in the buggy they had climbed so high. Beyond rolling pasture and woods was the Shenandoah glowing with afternoon.
“Shen-an-doah!” he crooned.
Suddenly he was kneeling at the window, and for the first time since he had forsaken Jim Lefferts and football and joyous ribaldry, his soul was free of all the wickedness which had daubed it—oratorical ambitions, emotional orgasm, dead sayings of dull seers, dogmas, and piety. The golden winding river drew him, the sky uplifted him, and with outflung arms he prayed for deliverance from prayer.
“I’ve found her. Sharon. Oh, I’m not going on with this evangelistic bunk. Trapping idiots into holy monkey-shines! No, by God, I’ll be honest! I’ll tuck her under my arm and go out and fight. Business. Put it over. Build something big. And laugh, not snivel and shake hands with church-members! I’ll do it!”
Then and there ended his rebellion.
The vision of the beautiful river was hidden from him by a fog of compromises. . . . How could he keep away from evangelistic melodrama if he was to have Sharon? And to have Sharon was the one purpose of life. She loved her meetings, she would never leave them, and she would rule him. And—he was exalted by his own oratory.
“Besides!There is a lot to all this religious stuff. We do do good. Maybe we jolly ’em into emotions too much, but don’t that wake folks up from their ruts? Course it does!”
So he put on a white turtle-necked sweater and with a firm complacent tread he went down to join Sharon.
She was waiting in the hall, so light and young in her middy blouse and red tam.
“Let’s not talk seriously. I’m not Sister Falconer—I’m Sharon today. Gee, to think I’ve ever spoken to five thousand people! Come on! I’ll race you up the hill!”
The wide lower hall, traditionally hung with steel engravings and a Chickamauga sword, led from the front door, under the balcony of the staircase, to the garden at the back, still bold with purple asters and golden zinnias.
Through the hall she fled, through the garden, past the stone sundial, and over the long rough grass to the orchard on the sunny hill; no ceremonious Juno now but a nymph; and he followed, heavy, graceless, but pounding on inescapable, thinking less of her fleeting slenderness than of the fact that since he had stopped smoking his wind cer’nly was a lot better—cer’nly was.
“Youcanrun!” she said, as she stopped, panting, by a walled garden with espalier pears.
“You bet I can! And I’m a grand footballer, a bearcat at tackling, my young friend!”
He picked her up, while she kicked and grudgingly admired, “You’re terribly strong!”
But the day of halcyon October sun was too serene even for his coltishness, and sedately they tramped up the hill, swinging their joined hands; sedately they talked (ever so hard he tried to live up to the Falconer Family, an Old Mansion, and Darky Mammies) of the world-menacing perils of Higher Criticism, and the genius of E. O. Excell as a composer of sacred but snappy melodies.
While he dressed, that is, while he put on the brown suit and a superior new tie, Elmer worried. This sure intimacy was too perfect. Something would interrupt it. Sharon had spoken vaguely of brothers, of high-nosed aunts and cousins, of a cloud of Falconer witnesses, and the house was large enough to secrete along its corridors a horde of relatives. Would he, at dinner, have to meet hostile relics who would stare at him and make him talk and put him down as a piece of Terwillinger provinciality? He could see the implications in their level faded eyes; he could see Sharon swayed by their scorn and delivered from such uncertain fascination as his lustiness and boldness had cast over her.
“Damn!” he said. “I’m just as good as they are!”
He came reluctantly down-stairs to the shabby, endearing drawing-room, with its whatnot of curios—a Chinese slipper, a stag carved of black walnut, a shell from Madagascar—with its jar of dried cattails, its escritoire and gate-legged table, and a friendly old couch before the white fireplace. The room, the whole spreading house, was full of whispers and creakings and dead suspicious eyes. . . . There had been no whispers and no memories in the cottage at Paris, Kansas. . . . Elmer stood wistful, a little beaten boy, his runaway hour with the daughter of the manor house ended, too worshiping to resent losing the one thing he wanted.
Then she was at the door, extremely unevangelistic, pleasantly worldly in an evening frock of black satin and gold lace. He had not known people who wore evening frocks. She held out her hand gaily to him, but it was not gaily that he went to her—meekly, rather, resolved that he would not disgrace her before the suspicious family.
They came hand in hand into the dining-room and he saw that the table was set for two only.
He almost giggled, “Thought maybe there’d be a lot of folks,” but he was saved, and he did not bustle about her chair.
He said grace, at length.
Candles and mahogany, silver and old lace, roses and Wedgwood, canvasback and the butler in bottle-green. He sank into a stilled happiness as she told riotous stories of evangelism—of her tenor soloist, the plump Adelbert Shoop, who loved crème de cocoa; of the Swedish farmer’s wife, who got her husband prayed out of the drinking, cursing, and snuff habits, then tried to get him prayed out of playing checkers, whereupon he went out and got marvelously pickled on raw alcohol.
“I’ve never seen you so quiet before,” she said. “You really can be nice. Happy?”
“Terribly!”
The roof of the front porch had been turned into an outdoor terrace, and here, wrapped up against the cool evening, they had their coffee and peppermints in long deck chairs. They were above the tree-tops; and as their eyes widened in the darkness they could see the river by starlight. The hoot of a wandering owl; then the kind air, the whispering air, crept round them.
“Oh, my God, it is so sweet—so sweet!” he sighed, as he fumbled for her hand and felt it slip confidently into his. Suddenly he was ruthless, tearing it all down:
“Too darn’ sweet for me, I guess. Sharon, I’m a bum. I’m not so bad as a preacher, or I wouldn’t be if I had the chance, butme—— I’m no good. I have cut out the booze and tobacco—for you—I really have! But I used to drink like a fish, and till I met you I never thought any woman except my mother was any good. I’m just a second-rate traveling man. I came from Paris, Kansas, and I’m not even up to that hick burg, because they are hard-working and decent there, and I’m not even that. And you—you’re not only a prophetess, which you sure are, the real big thing, but you’re a Falconer. Family! Old servants! This old house! Oh, it’s no use! You’re too big for me. Just because I do love you. Terribly. Because I can’t lie to you!”
He had put away her slim hand, but it came creeping back over his, her fingers tracing the valleys between his knuckles, while she murmured:
“You will be big! I’ll make you! And perhaps I’m a prophetess, a little bit, but I’m also a good liar. You see I’m not a Falconer. There ain’t any! My name is Katie Jonas. I was born in Utica. My dad worked on a brickyard. I picked out the name Sharon Falconer while I was a stenographer. I never saw this house till two years ago; I never saw these old family servants till then—they worked for the folks that owned the place—and even they weren’t Falconers—they had the aristocratic name of Sprugg! Incidentally, this place isn’t a quarter paid for. And yet I’m not a liar! I’m not! IamSharon Falconer now! I’ve made her—by prayer and by having a right to be her! And you’re going to stop being poor Elmer Gantry of Paris, Kansas. You’re going to be the Reverend Dr. Gantry, the great captain of souls! Oh, I’m glad you don’t come from anywhere in particular! Cecil Aylston—oh, I guess he does love me, but I always feel he’s laughing at me. Hang him, he notices the infinitives I split and not the souls I save! But you— Oh, you will serve me—won’t you?”
“Forever!”
And there was little said then. Even the agreement that she was to get rid of Cecil, to make Elmer her permanent assistant, was reached in a few casual assents. He was certain that the steely film of her dominance was withdrawn.
Yet when they went in, she said gaily that they must be early abed; up early tomorrow; and that she would take ten pounds off him at tennis.
When he whispered, “Where is your room, sweet?” she laughed with a chilling impersonality, “You’ll never know, poor lamb!”
Elmer the bold, Elmer the enterprising, went clumping off to his room, and solemnly he undressed, wistfully he stood by the window, his soul riding out on the darkness to incomprehensible destinations. He humped into bed and dropped toward sleep, too weary with fighting her resistance to lie thinking of possible tomorrows.
He heard a tiny scratching noise. It seemed to him that it was the doorknob turning. He sat up, throbbing. The sound was frightened away, but began again, a faint grating, and the bottom of the door swished slowly on the carpet. The fan of pale light from the hall widened and, craning, he could see her, but only as a ghost, a white film.
He held out his arms, desperately, and presently she stumbled against them.
“No! Please!” Hers was the voice of a sleep-walker. “I just came in to say good-night and tuck you into bed. Such a bothered unhappy child! Into bed. I’ll kiss you good-night and run.”
His head burrowed into the pillow. Her hand touched his cheek lightly, yet through her fingers, he believed, flowed a current which lulled him into slumber, a slumber momentary but deep with contentment.
With effort he said, “You too—you need comforting, maybe you need bossing, when I get over being scared of you.”
“No. I must take my loneliness alone. I’m different, whether it’s cursed or blessed. But—lonely—yes—lonely.”
He was sharply awake as her fingers slipped up his cheek, across his temple, into his swart hair.
“Your hair is so thick,” she said drowsily.
“Your heart beats so. Dear Sharon—”
Suddenly, clutching his arm, she cried, “Come! It is the call!”
He was bewildered as he followed her, white in her nightgown trimmed at the throat with white fur, out of his room, down the hall, up a steep little stairway to her own apartments; the more bewildered to go from that genteel corridor, with its forget-me-not wallpaper and stiff engravings of Virginia worthies, into a furnace of scarlet.
Her bedroom was as insane as an Oriental cozy corner of 1895—a couch high on carven ivory posts, covered with a mandarin coat; unlighted brass lamps in the likeness of mosques and pagodas; gilt papier-mâché armor on the walls; a wide dressing-table with a score of cosmetics in odd Parisian bottles; tall candlesticks, the twisted and flowered candles lighted; and over everything a hint of incense.
She opened a closet, tossed a robe to him, cried, “For the service of the altar!” and vanished into a dressing-room beyond. Diffidently, feeling rather like a fool, he put on the robe. It was of purple velvet embroidered with black symbols unknown to him, the collar heavy with gold thread. He was not quite sure what he was to do, and he waited obediently.
She stood in the doorway, posing, while he gaped. She was so tall and her hands, at her sides, the backs up and the fingers arched, moved like lilies on the bosom of a stream. She was fantastic in a robe of deep crimson adorned with golden stars and crescents, swastikas and tau crosses; her feet were in silver sandals, and round her hair was a tiara of silver moons set with steel points that flickered in the candlelight. A mist of incense floated about her, seemed to rise from her, and as she slowly raised her arms he felt in schoolboyish awe that she was veritably a priestess.
Her voice was under the spell of the sleep-walker once more as she sighed “Come! It is the chapel.”
She marched to a door part-hidden by the couch, and led him into a room—
Now he was no longer part amorous, part inquisitive, but all uneasy.
What hanky-panky of construction had been performed he never knew; perhaps it was merely that the floor above this small room had been removed so that it stretched up two stories; but in any case there it was—a shrine bright as bedlam at the bottom but seeming to rise through darkness to the sky. The walls were hung with black velvet; there were no chairs; and the whole room focused on a wide altar. It was an altar of grotesque humor or of madness, draped with Chinese fabrics, crimson, apricot, emerald, gold. There were two stages of pink marble. Above the altar hung an immense crucifix with the Christ bleeding at nail-wounds and pierced side; and on the upper stage were plaster busts of the Virgin, St. Theresa, St. Catherine, a garish Sacred Heart, a dolorous simulacrum of the dying St. Stephen. But crowded on the lower stage was a crazy rout of what Elmer called “heathen idols”: ape-headed gods, crocodile-headed gods, a god with three heads and a god with six arms, a jade-and-ivory Buddha, an alabaster naked Venus, and in the center of them all a beautiful, hideous, intimidating and alluring statuette of a silver goddess with a triple crown and a face as thin and long and passionate as that of Sharon Falconer. Before the altar was a long velvet cushion, very thick and soft. Here Sharon suddenly knelt, waving him to his knees, as she cried:
“It is the hour! Blessed Virgin, Mother Hera, Mother Frigga, Mother Ishtar, Mother Isis, dread Mother Astarte of the weaving arms, it is thy priestess, it is she who after the blind centuries and the groping years shall make it known to the world that ye are one, and that in me are ye all revealed, and that in this revelation shall come peace and wisdom universal, the secret of the spheres and the pit of understanding. Ye who have leaned over me and on my lips pressed your immortal fingers, take this my brother to your bosoms, open his eyes, release his pinioned spirit, make him as the gods, that with me he may carry the revelation for which a thousand thousand grievous years the world has panted.
“O rosy cross and mystic tower of ivory—
“Hear my prayer.
“O sublime April crescent—
“Hear my prayer.
“O sword of undaunted steel most excellent—
“Hear thou my prayer.
“O serpent with unfathomable eyes—
“Hear my prayer.
“Ye veiled ones and ye bright ones—from caves forgotten, the peaks of the future, the clanging today—join in me, lift up, receive him, dread nameless ones; yea, lift us then, mystery on mystery, sphere above sphere, dominion on dominion, to the very throne!”
She picked up a Bible which lay by her on the long velvet cushion at the foot of the altar, she crammed it into his hands, and cried, “Read—read—quickly!”
It was open at the Song of Solomon, and bewildered he chanted:
“How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter! The joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman. Thy two breasts are like two young roes. Thy neck is as a tower of ivory. The hair of thine head like purple; the king is held in the galleries. How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!”
She interrupted him, her voice high and a little shrill: “O mystical rose, O lily most admirable, O wondrous union; O St. Anna, Mother Immaculate, Demeter, Mother Beneficent, Lakshmi, Mother Most Shining; behold, I am his and he is yours and ye are mine!”
As he read on, his voice rose like a triumphant priest’s:
“I said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof—”
That verse he never finished, for she swayed sideways as she knelt before the altar, and sank into his arms, her lips parted.
They sat on the hilltop, looking down on noon in the valley, sleepily talking till he roused with: “Why won’t you marry me?”
“No. Not for years, anyway. I’m too old—thirty-two to your—what is it, twenty-eight or -nine? And I must be free for the service of Our Lord. . . . You do know I mean that? I am really consecrated, no matter what I may seem to do!”
“Sweet, of course I do! Oh, yes.”
“But not marry. It’s good at times to be just human, but mostly I have to live like a saint. . . . Besides, I do think men converts come in better if they know I’m not married.”
“Damn it, listen! Do you love me a little?”
“Yes. A little! Oh, I’m as fond of you as I can be of any one except Katie Jonas. Dear child!”
She dropped her head on his shoulder, casually now, in the bee-thrumming orchard aisle, and his arm tightened.
That evening they sang gospel hymns together, to the edification of the Old Family Servants, who began to call him Doctor.
CHAPTER XIII
nottill December did Sharon Falconer take Elmer on as assistant.
When she discharged Cecil Aylston, he said, in a small cold voice, “This is the last time, my dear prophet and peddler, that I shall ever try to be decent.” But it is known that for several months he tried to conduct a rescue mission in Buffalo, and if he was examined for insanity, it was because he was seen to sit for hours staring. He was killed in a gambling den in Juarez, and when she heard of it Sharon was very sorry—she spoke of going to fetch his body, but she was too busy with holy work.
Elmer joined her at the beginning of the meetings in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He opened the meetings for her, made announcements, offered prayer, preached when she was too weary, and led the singing when Adelbert Shoop, the musical director, was indisposed. He developed a dozen sound sermons out of encyclopedias of exegesis, handbooks for evangelists, and manuals of sermon outlines. He had a powerful discourse, used in the For Men Only service, on the strength and joy of complete chastity; he told how Jim Leffingwell saw the folly of pleasure at the death-bed of his daughter; and he had an uplifting address, suitable to all occasions, on Love as the Morning and the Evening Star.
He helped Sharon where Cecil had held her back—or so she said. While she kept her vocabulary of poetic terms, Elmer encouraged her in just the soap-box denunciation of sin which had made Cecil shudder. Also he spoke of Cecil as “Osric,” which she found very funny indeed, and as “Percy,” and “Algernon.” He urged her to tackle the biggest towns, the most polite or rowdy audiences, and to advertise herself not in the wet-kitten high-church phrases approved by Cecil but in a manner befitting a circus, an Elks’ convention, or a new messiah.
Under Elmer’s urging she ventured for the first time into the larger cities. She descended on Minneapolis and, with the support only of such sects as the Full Gospel Assembly, the Nazarenes, the Church of God, and the Wesleyan Methodists, she risked her savings in hiring an armory and inserting two-column six-inch advertisements of herself.
Minneapolis was quite as enlivened as smaller places by Sharon’s voice and eyes, by her Grecian robes, by her gold-and-white pyramidal altar, and the profits were gratifying. Thereafter she sandwiched Indianapolis, Rochester, Atlanta, Seattle, the two Portlands, Pittsburgh, in between smaller cities.
For two years life was a whirlwind to Elmer Gantry.
It was so frantic that he could never remember which town was which. Everything was a blur of hot sermons, writhing converts, appeals for contributions, trains, denunciation of lazy personal workers, denunciations of Adelbert Shoop for getting drunk, firing of Adelbert Shoop, taking back of Adelbert Shoop when no other tenor so unctuously pious was to be found.
Of one duty he was never weary: of standing around and being impressive and very male for the benefit of lady seekers. How tenderly he would take their hands and moan, “Won’t you hear the dear Savior’s voice calling, Sister?” and all of them, spinsters with pathetic dried girlishness, misunderstood wives, held fast to his hand and were added to the carefully kept total of saved souls. Sharon saw to it that he dressed the part—double-breasted dark blue with a dashing tie in winter, and in summer white suits with white shoes.
But however loudly the skirts rustled about him, so great was Sharon’s intimidating charm that he was true to her.
If he was a dervish figure those two years, she was a shooting star; inspired in her preaching, passionate with him, then a naughty child who laughed and refused to be serious even at the sermon hour; gallantly generous, then a tight-fisted virago squabbling over ten cents for stamps. Always, in every high-colored mood, she was his religion and his reason for being.
When she attacked the larger towns and asked for the support of the richer churches, Sharon had to create several new methods in the trade of evangelism. The churches were suspicious of women evangelists—women might do very well in visiting the sick, knitting for the heathen, and giving strawberry festivals, but they couldn’t shout loud enough to scare the devil out of sinners. Indeed all evangelists, men and women, were under attack. Sound churchmen here and there were asking whether there was any peculiar spiritual value in frightening people into groveling maniacs. They were publishing statistics which asserted that not ten per cent. of the converts at emotional revival meetings remained church-members. They were even so commercial as to inquire why a pastor with a salary of two thousand dollars a year—when he got it—should agonize over helping an evangelist to make ten thousand, forty thousand.
All these doubters had to be answered. Elmer persuaded Sharon to discharge her former advance-agent—he had been a minister and contributor to the religious press, till the unfortunate affair of the oil stock—and hire a real press-agent, trained in newspaper work, circus advertising, and real estate promoting. It was Elmer and the press-agent who worked up the new technique of risky but impressive defiance.
Where the former advance-man had begged the ministers and wealthy laymen of a town to which Sharon wanted to be invited to appreciate her spirituality, and had sat nervously about hotels, the new salesman of salvation was brusque:
“I can’t waste my time and the Lord’s time waiting for you people to make up your minds. Sister Falconer is especially interested in this city because she has been informed that there is a subterranean quickening here such as would simply jam your churches, with a grand new outpouring of the spirit, provided some real expert like her came to set the fuse alight. But there are so many other towns begging for her services that if you can’t make up your minds immediately, we’ll have to accept their appeals and pass you up. Sorry. Can only wait till midnight. Tonight. Reserved my Pullman already.”
There were ever so many ecclesiastical bodies who answered that they didn’t see why he waited even till midnight, but if they were thus intimidated into signing the contract (an excellent contract, drawn up by a devout Christian Scientist lawyer named Finkelstein) they were the more prepared to give spiritual and financial support to Sharon’s labors when she did arrive.
The new press-agent was finally so impressed by the beauties of evangelism, as contrasted with his former circuses and real estate, that he was himself converted, and sometimes when he was in town with the troupe, he sang in the choir and spoke to Y. M. C. A. classes in journalism. But even Elmer’s arguments could never get him to give up a sturdy, plodding devotion to poker.
The contract signed, the advance-man remembered his former newspaper labors, and for a few days became touchingly friendly with all the reporters in town. There were late parties at his hotel; there was much sending of bell-boys for more bottles of Wilson and White Horse and Green River. The press-agent admitted that he really did think that Miss Falconer was the greatest woman since Sarah Bernhardt, and he let the boys have stories, guaranteed held exclusive, of her beauty, the glories of her family, her miraculous power of fetching sinners or rain by prayer, and the rather vaguely dated time when, as a young girl, she had been recognized by Dwight Moody as his successor.
South of the Mason and Dixon line her grandfather was merely Mr. Falconer, a bellicose and pious man, but far enough north he was General Falconer of Ole Virginny—preferably spelled that way—who had been the adviser and solace of General Robert E. Lee. The press-agent also wrote the posters for the Ministerial Alliance, giving Satan a generous warning as to what was to happen to him.
So when Sharon and the troupe arrived, the newspapers were eager, the walls and shop-windows were scarlet with placards, and the town was breathless. Sometimes a thousand people gathered at the station for her arrival.
There were always a few infidels, particularly among the reporters, who had doubted her talents, but when they saw her in the train vestibule, in a long white coat, when she had stood there a second with her eyes closed, lost in prayer for this new community, when slowly she held out her white nervous hands in greeting—then the advance-agent’s work was two-thirds done here and he could go on to whiten new fields for the harvest.
But there was still plenty of discussion before Sharon was rid of the forces of selfishness and able to get down to the job of spreading light.
Local committees were always stubborn, local committees were always jealous, local committees were always lazy, and local committees were always told these facts, with vigor. The heart of the arguments was money.
Sharon was one of the first evangelists to depend for all her profit not on a share of the contributions nor on a weekly offering but on one night devoted entirely to a voluntary “thank offering” for her and her crew alone. It sounded unselfish and it brought in more; every devotee saved up for that occasion; and it proved easier to get one fifty-dollar donation than a dozen of a dollar each. But to work up this lone offering to suitably thankful proportions, a great deal of loving and efficient preparation was needed—reminders given by the chief pastors, bankers, and other holy persons of the town, the distribution of envelopes over which devotees were supposed to brood for the whole six weeks of the meetings, and innumerable newspaper paragraphs about the self-sacrifice and heavy expenses of the evangelists.
It was over these innocent necessary precautions that the local committees always showed their meanness. They liked giving over only one contribution to the evangelist, but they wanted nothing said about it till they themselves had been taken care of—till the rent of the hall or the cost of building a tabernacle, the heat, the lights, the advertising, and other expenses had been paid.
Sharon would meet the committee—a score of clergymen, a score of their most respectable deacons, a few angular Sunday School superintendents, a few disapproving wives—in a church parlor, and for the occasion she always wore the gray suit and an air of metropolitan firmness, and swung a pair of pince-nez with lenses made of window-glass. While in familiar words the local chairman was explaining to her that their expenses were heavy, she would smile as though she knew something they could not guess, then let fly at them breathlessly:
“I’m afraid there is some error here! I wonder if you are quite in the mood to forget all material things and really throw yourselves into the self-abnegating glory of a hot campaign for souls? I know all you have to say—as a matter of fact, you’ve forgotten to mention your expenses for watchmen, extra hymn books, and hiring camp-chairs!
“But you haven’t the experience to appreciatemyexpenses! I have to maintain almost as great a staff—not only workers and musicians but all my other representatives, whom you never see—as though I had a factory. Besides them, I have my charities. There is, for example, the Old Ladies’ Home, which I keep up entirely—oh, I shan’t say anything about it, but if you could see those poor aged women turning to me with such anxious faces—!”
(Where that Old Ladies’ Home was, Elmer never learned.)
“We come here without any guarantee; we depend wholly upon the free-will offering of the last day; and I’m afraid you’re going to stress the local expenses so that people will not feel like giving on the last day even enough to pay the salaries of my assistants. I’m taking—if it were not that I abominate the pitiful and character-destroying vice of gambling, I’d say that I’m taking such a terrible gamble that it frightens me! But there it is, and—”
While she was talking, Sharon was sizing up this new assortment of clergy: the cranks, the testy male old maids, the advertising and pushing demagogues, the commonplace pulpit-job-holders, the straddling young liberals; the real mystics, the kindly fathers of their flocks, the lovers of righteousness. She had picked out as her advocate the most sympathetic, and she launched her peroration straight at him:
“Do you want to ruin me, so that never again shall I be able to carry the message, to carry salvation, to the desperate souls who are everywhere waiting for me, crying for my help? Is that your purpose—you, the elect, the people chosen to help me in the service of the dear Lord Jesus himself? Is that your purpose? Is it? Is it?”
She began sobbing, which was Elmer’s cue to jump up and have a wonderful new idea.
He knew, did Elmer, that the dear brethren and sisters had no such purpose. They just wanted to be practical. Well, why wouldn’t it be a good notion for the committee to go to the well-to-do church-members and explain the unparalleled situation; tell them that this was the Lord’s work, and that aside from the unquestioned spiritual benefits, the revival would do so much good that crime would cease, and taxes thus be lessened; that workmen would turn from agitation to higher things, and work more loyally at the same wages. If they got enough pledges from the rich for current expenses, those expenses would not have to be stressed at the meetings, and people could properly be coaxed to save up for the final “thank offering”; not have to be nagged to give more than small coins at the nightly collections.
There were other annoyances to discuss with the local committee. Why, Elmer would demand, hadn’t they provided enough dressing-rooms in the tabernacle? Sister Falconer needed privacy. Sometimes just before the meeting she and he had to have important conferences. Why hadn’t they provided more volunteer ushers? He must have them at once, to train them, for it was the ushers, when properly coached, who would ease struggling souls up to the altar for the skilled finishing touches by the experts.
Had they planned to invite big delegations from the local institutions—from Smith Brothers’ Catsup Factory, from the car-shops, from the packing house? Oh, yes, they must plan to stir up these institutions; an evening would be dedicated to each of them, the representatives would be seated together, and they’d have such a happy time singing their favorite hymns.
By this time, a little dazed, the local committee were granting everything; and they looked almost convinced when Sharon wound up with a glad ringing:
“All of you must look forward, and joyfully, to a sacrifice of time and money in these meetings. We have come here at a great sacrifice, and we are here only to help you.”
The afternoon and evening sermons—those were the high points of the meetings, when Sharon cried in a loud voice, her arms out to them, “Surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not,” and “All our righteousness is as filthy rags,” and “We have sinned and come short of the glory of God,” and “Oh, for the man to arise in me, that the man I am may cease to be,” and “Get right with God,” and “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation.”
But before even these guaranteed appeals could reach wicked hearts, the audience had to be prepared for emotion, and to accomplish this there was as much labor behind Sharon’s eloquence as there is of wardrobes and scene-shifters and box offices behind the frenzy of Lady Macbeth. Of this preparation Elmer had a great part.
He took charge, as soon as she had trained him, of the men personal workers, leaving the girls to the Director of Personal Work, a young woman who liked dancing and glass jewelry but who was admirable at listening to the confessions of spinsters. His workers were bank-tellers, bookkeepers in wholesale groceries, shoe clerks, teachers of manual training. They canvassed shops, wholesale warehouses, and factories, and held noon meetings in offices, where they explained that the most proficient use of shorthand did not save one from the probability of hell. For Elmer explained that prospects were more likely to be converted if they came to the meetings with a fair amount of fear.
When they were permitted, the workers were to go from desk to desk, talking to each victim about the secret sins he was comfortably certain to have. And both men and women workers were to visit the humbler homes and offer to kneel and pray with the floury and embarrassed wife, the pipe-wreathed and shoeless husband.
All the statistics of the personal work—so many souls invited to come to the altar, so many addresses to workmen over their lunch-pails, so many cottage prayers, with the length of each—were rather imaginatively entered by Elmer and the Director of Personal Work on the balance-sheet which Sharon used as a report after the meetings and as a talking-point for the sale of future meetings.
Elmer met daily with Adelbert Shoop, that yearning and innocent tenor who was in charge of music, to select hymns. There were times when the audiences had to be lulled into confidence by “Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling,” times when they were made to feel brotherly and rustic with “It’s the Old-time Religion”—