Elmer Gantry (18 page)

Though he did not sleep well, he was up early and at his toilet; he shaved, he touched up his bluff handsomeness with
lilac water and talcum, he did his nails, sitting in athletic underwear, awaiting his new suit, sent down for pressing. The
new purpose in a life recently so dispirited gave vitality to his bold eyes and spring to his thick muscles as he strode
through the gold-and-marble lobby of the Antlers Hotel and awaited Sharon at the restaurant door. She came down fresh in
white crash bordered with blue. As they met they laughed, admitting comradeship in folly. He took her arm gaily, led her
through a flutter of waitresses excited over the coming of the celebrated lady of God, and ordered competently.

“I’ve got a great idea,” said he. “I’ve got to beat it this afternoon, but I’ll be back in Lincoln on Friday, and how’d
it be if you billed me to address your meeting as a saved business man, and I talked for half an hour or so on Friday
evening about the good, hard, practical, dollars-and-cents value of Christ in Commerce?”

“Are you a good talker?”

“I’m the crack salesman of the Pequot Farm Implement Company, Sharon, and if you don’t believe it—”

“Oh, I do. (She shouldn’t have.) I’m sure you tell the truth often. Of course we won’t need to mention the fact that
you’re a preacher, unless somebody insists on asking. How would this be as a topic—‘Getting the Goods with a Gideon
Bible?’”

“Say, that would be elegant! How I was in some hick town, horrible weather, slush and rain and everything—dark skies,
seemed like sun never would shine again—feet all soaked from tramping the streets— no sales, plumb discouraged—sat in my
room, forgotten to buy one of the worldly magazines I’d been accustomed to read—idly picked up a Gideon Bible and read the
parable of the talents—found that same day YOU were in town—went and got converted—saw now it wasn’t just for money but for
the Kingdom of Christ, to heighten my influence as a Christian business man, that I had to increase sales. That bucked up my
self-confidence so that I increased sales to beat the band! And how I owe everything to your inspired powers, so it’s a
privilege to be able to testify. And about how it isn’t the weak skinny failure that’s the fellow to get saved, but takes a
really strong man to not be ashamed to surrender all for Jesus.”

“Why, I think that’s fine, Brother Elmer, I really do. And dwell a lot on being in your hotel room there—you took off
your shoes and threw yourself down on the bed, feeling completely beaten, but you were so restless you got up and poked
around the room and picked up the Gideon Bible. I’ll feature it big. And you’ll make it strong, Elmer? You won’t let me
down? Because I really will headline it in my announcements. I’ve persuaded you to come clear from Omaha— no, that’s not
far—clear from Denver for it. And if you do throw yourself into it and tear loose, it’ll add greatly to the glory of God,
and the success of the meeting in winning souls. You will?”

“Dear, I’ll slam into ’em so hard you’ll want me in every town you go to. You bet.”

“Um, that’s as may be, Elmer. Here comes Cecil Aylston—you know my assistant? He looks so cross. He is a dear, but he’s
so terribly highbrow and refined and everything and he’s always trying to nag me into being refined. But you’ll love
him.”

“I will not! Anyway, I’ll struggle against it!”

They laughed.

The Rev. Cecil Aylston, of the flaxen hair and the superior British complexion, glided to their table, looked at Elmer
with a blankness more infuriating than a scowl, and sat down, observing:

“I don’t want to intrude, Miss Falconer, but you know the committee of clergy are awaiting you in the parlor.”

“Oh, dear,” sighed Sharon. “Are they as terrible as usual here? Can’t you go up and get the kneeling and praying done
while I finish my scrambled eggs? Have you told them they’ve got to double the amount of the pledges before this week is
over or the souls in Lincoln can go right on being damned?” Cecil was indicating Elmer with an alarmed jerk of his head.
“Oh, don’t worry about Elmer. He’s one of us—going to speak for us Friday—used to be a terribly famous preacher, but he’s
found a wider field in business—Reverend Aylston, Reverend Gantry. Now run along, Cecil, and keep ’em pious and busy. Any
nice-looking young preachers in the committee or are they all old stiffs?”

Aylston answered with a tight-lipped glare, and flowed away.

“Dear Cecil, he is so useful to me—he’s actually made me take to reading poetry and everything. If he just wouldn’t be
polite at breakfast-time! I wouldn’t mind facing the wild beasts of Ephesus, but I can’t stand starch with my eggs. Now I
must go up and join him.”

“You’ll have lunch with me?”

“I will not! My dear young man, this endeth my being silly for this week. From this moment on I’ll be one of the
anointed, and if you want me to like you—God help you if you come around looking pussy-catty while I’m manhandling these
stiff-necked brethren in Christ! I’ll see you Friday—I’ll have dinner with you, here, before the meeting. And I can depend
on you? Good!”

Cecil Aylston was a good deal of a mystic, a good deal of a ritualist, a bit of a rogue, something of a scholar,
frequently a drunkard, more frequently an ascetic, always a gentleman, and always an adventurer. He was thirty-two now. At
Winchester and New College, he had been known for sprinting, snobbishness, and Greek versification. He had taken orders,
served as a curate in a peculiarly muddy and ancient and unlighted church in the East End, and become fanatically
Anglo–Catholic. While he was considering taking the three vows and entering a Church of England monastery, his vicar kicked
him out, and no one was ever quite certain whether it was because of his “Romish tendencies” or the navvy’s daughter whom he
had got with child.

He was ordered down to a bleak, square, stone church in Cornwall, but he resigned and joined the Plymouth Brethren, among
whom, in resounding galvanized-iron chapels in the Black Country, he had renown for denunciation of all the pleasant sins.
He came to Liverpool for a series of meetings; he wandered by the Huskinson docks, saw a liner ready for sea, bought a
steerage ticket, took the passport which he had ready for a promised flight to Rio with the wife of an evangelical merchant
in coals and, without a word to the brethren or the ardent lady of the coals, sailed sulkily off to America.

In New York he sold neckties in a department store, he preached in a mission, he tutored the daughter of a great
wholesale fish-dealer, and wrote nimble and thoroughly irritating book-reviews. He left town two hours ahead of the
fish-dealer’s eldest son, and turned up in Waco, Texas, teaching in a business college, in Winona, Minnesota, preaching in a
Nazarene Chapel, in Carmel, California, writing poetry and real-estate brochures, and in Miles City, Montana, as the summer
supply in a Congregational pulpit. He was so quiet, so studious, here that the widow of a rancher picked him up and married
him. She died. He lost the entire fortune in two days at Tia Juana. He became extra pious after that and was converted from
time to time by Billy Sunday, Gipsy Smith, Biederwolf, and several other embarrassed evangelists who did not expect a
convert so early in the campaign and had made no plans to utilize him.

It was in Ishpeming, Michigan, where he was conducting a shooting-gallery while he sought by mail a mastership in Groton
School, that he heard and was more than usually converted by Sharon Falconer. He fell in love with her, and with
contemptuous steady resolution he told her so.

At the moment she was without a permanent man first assistant. She had just discharged a really useful loud-voiced United
Brethren D.D. for hinting to delighted sons of Belial that his relations to her were at least brotherly. She took on the
Reverend Cecil Aylston.

He loved her, terrifyingly. He was so devoted to her that he dropped his drinking, his smoking, and a tendency to forgery
which had recently been creeping on him. And he did wonders for her.

She had been too emotional. He taught her to store it up and fling it all out in one overpowering catastrophic evening.
She had been careless of grammar, and given to vulgar barnyard illustrations. He taught her to endure sitting still and
reading—reading Swinburne and Jowett, Pater and Jonathan Edwards, Newman and Sir Thomas Browne. He taught her to use her
voice, to use her eyes, and in more private relations, to use her soul.

She had been puzzled by him, annoyed by him, led meekly by him, and now she was weary of his supercilious devotion. He
was more devoted to her than to life, and for her he refused a really desirable widow who could have got him back into the
Episcopal fold and acquired for him the dim rich sort of church for which he longed after these months of sawdust and sweaty
converts.

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;
I KNOW it’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, are YOU going to put off repentance till it’s too late? That’s YOUR affair, 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
you HELP me? 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.