Elmer Gantry (27 page)

Cleo Benham had spent three years in the Sparta Women’s College, specializing in piano, organ, French, English
literature, strictly expurgated, and study of the Bible. Returned to Banjo Crossing, she was a fervent church-worker. She
played the organ and rehearsed the choir; she was the superintendent of the juvenile department in the Sunday School; she
decorated the church for Easter, for funerals, for the Halloween Supper.

She was twenty-seven, five years younger than Elmer.

Though she was not very lively in summer-evening front-porch chatter, though on the few occasions when she sinned against
the Discipline and danced she seemed a little heavy on her feet, though she had a corseted purity which was dismaying to the
earthy young men of Banjo Crossing, yet she was handsome, she was kind, and her father was reputed to be worth not a cent
less than seventy-five thousand dollars. So almost every eligible male in the vicinity had hinted at proposing to her.

Gently and compassionately she had rejected them one by one. Marriage must, she felt, be a sacrament; she must be the
helpmate of some one who was “doing a tremendous amount of good in the world.” This good she identified with medicine or
preaching.

Her friends assured her, “My! With your Bible training and your music and all, you’d make a perfect pastor’s wife. Just
dandy! You’d be such a help to him.”

But no detached preacher or doctor had happened along, and she had remained insulated, a little puzzled, hungry over the
children of her friends, each year more passionately given to hymnody and agonized solitary prayer.

Now, with innocent boldness, she was exclaiming to Elmer: “We were so afraid the bishop would send us some pastor that
was old and worn-out. The people here are lovely, but they’re kind of slow-going; they need somebody to wake them up. I’m so
glad he sent somebody that was young and attractive—Oh, my, I shouldn’t have said that! I was just thinking of the church,
you understand.”

Her eyes said that she had not been just thinking of the church.

She looked at her wrist-watch (the first in Banjo Crossing) and chanted, “Why, my gracious, it’s six o’clock! Would you
like to walk home with me instead of going to Mrs. Clark’s—you could wash up at Papa’s.”

“You can’t lose me!” exulted Elmer, hastily amending, “—as the slangy youngers say! Yes, indeed, I should be very pleased
to have the pleasure of walking home with you.”

Under the elms, past the rose-bushes, through dust emblazoned by the declining sun, he walked with his stately
abbess.

He knew that she was the sort of wife who would help him to capture a bishopric. He persuaded himself that, with all her
virtue, she would eventually be interesting to kiss. He noted that they “made a fine couple.” He told himself that she was
the first woman he had ever found who was worthy of him. . . . Then he remembered Sharon. . . . But the pang lasted only a
moment, in the secure village peace, in the gentle flow of Cleo’s voice.

Once he was out of the sacred briskness of his store, Mr. Nathaniel Benham forgot discounts and became an affable host.
He said, “Well, well, Brother,” ever so many times, and shook hands profusely. Mrs. Benham—she was a large woman, rather
handsome; she wore figured foulard, with an apron over it, as she had been helping in the kitchen—Mrs. Benham was equally
cordial. “I’ll just bet you’re hungry, Brother!” cried she.

He was, after a lunch of ham sandwich and coffee at a station lunch-room on the way down.

The Benham house was the proudest mansion in town. It was of yellow clapboards with white trim; it had a huge screened
porch and a little turret; a staircase window with a border of colored glass; and there was a real fireplace, though it was
never used. In front of the house, to Elmer’s admiration, was one of the three automobiles which were all that were to be
found in 1913 in Banjo Crossing. It was a bright red Buick with brass trimmings.

The Benham supper was as replete with fried chicken and theological questions as Elmer’s first supper with Deacon Bains
in Schoenheim. But here was wealth, for which Elmer had a touching reverence, and here was Cleo.

Lulu Bains had been a tempting mouthful; Cleo Benham was of the race of queens. To possess her, Elmer gloated, would in
itself be an empire, worth any battling. . . . And yet he did not itch to get her in a corner and buss her, as he had Lulu;
the slope of her proud shoulders did not make his fingers taut.

After supper, on the screened porch pleasant by dusk, Mr. Benham demanded, “What charges have you been holding, Brother
Gantry?”

Elmer modestly let him know how important he had been in the work of Sister Falconer; he admitted his scholarly research
at Mizpah Seminary; he made quite enough of his success at Schoenheim; he let it be known that he had been practically
assistant sales-manager of the Pequot Farm Implement Company.

Mr. Benham grunted with surprised admiration. Mrs. Benham gurgled, “My, we’re lucky to have a real high-class preacher
for once!” And Cleo—she leaned toward Elmer, in a deep willow chair, and her nearness was a charm.

He walked back happily in the June darkness; he felt neighborly when an unknown muttered, “Evening, Reverend!” and all
the way he saw Cleo, proud as Athena yet pliant as golden-skinned Aphrodite.

He had found his work, his mate, his future.

Virtue, he pointed out, certainly did pay.

He had two days to prepare his first sermon and unpack his trunk, his bags, and the books which he had purchased in
Zenith.

His possessions were not very consistent. He had a beautiful new morning coat, three excellent lounge suits, patent
leather shoes, a noble derby, a flourishing top hat, but he had only two suits of underclothes, both ragged. His socks were
of black silk, out at the toes. For breast-pocket display, he had silk handkerchiefs; but for use, only cotton rags torn at
the hem. He owned perfume, hair-oil, talcum powder; his cuff links were of solid gold; but for dressing-gown he used his
overcoat; his slippers were a frowsy pulp; and the watch which he carried on a gold and platinum chain was a one-dollar
alarm clock.

He had laid in a fruitful theological library. He had bought the fifty volumes of the Expositors’ Bible—source of
ready-made sermons—second-hand for $13.75. He had the sermons of Spurgeon, Jefferson, Brooks, and J. Wilbur Chapman. He was
willing to be guided by these masters, and not insist on forcing his own ideas on the world. He had a very useful book by
Bishop Aberman, “The Very Appearance of Evil,” advising young preachers to avoid sin. Elmer felt that this would be
unusually useful in his new life.

He had a dictionary—he liked to look at the colored plates depicting jewels, flags, plants, and aquatic birds; he had a
Bible dictionary, a concordance, a history of the Methodist Church, a history of Protestant missions, commentaries on the
individual books of the Bible, an outline of theology, and Dr. Argyle’s “The Pastor and His Flock,” which told how to
increase church collections, train choirs, take exercise, placate deacons, and make pasteboard models of Solomon’s Temple to
lead the little ones to holiness in the Sunday School.

In fact he had had a sufficient library—“God’s artillery in black and white,” as Bishop Toomis wittily dubbed it—to
inform himself of any detail in the practice of the Professional Good Man. He would be able to produce sermons which would
be highly informative about the geography of Palestine, yet useful to such of his fold as might have a sneaking desire to
read magazines on the Sabbath. Thus guided, he could increase the church membership; he could give advice to errant youth;
he could raise missionary funds so that the heathen in Calcutta and Peking might have the opportunity to become like the
Reverend Elmer Gantry.

Though Cleo took him for a drive through the country, most of the time before Sunday he dedicated to refurbishing a
sermon which he had often and successfully used with Sharon. The text was from Romans 1:16: “For I am not ashamed of the
gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.”

When he came up to the church on Sunday morning, tall and ample, grave and magnificent, his face fixed in a smile of
friendliness, his morning coat bright in the sun, a Bible under his arm, Elmer was exhilarated by the crowd filtering into
the church. The street was filled with country buggies and a Ford or two. As he went round to the back of the church,
passing a knot at the door, they shouted cordially, “Good morning, Brother!” and “Fine day, Reverend!”

Cleo was waiting for him with the choir—Miss Kloof, the school-teacher, Mrs. Diebel, wife of the implement dealer, Ed
Perkins, deliveryman for Mr. Benham, and Ray Faucett, butter-maker at the creamery.

Cleo held his hand and rejoiced, “What a wonderful crowd there is this morning! I’m so glad!”

Together they peeped through the parlor door into the auditorium, and he almost put his arm about her firm waist. . . .
It would have seemed natural, very pleasant and right and sweet.

When he marched out to the chancel, the church was full, a dozen standing. They all breathed with admiration. (He learned
later that the last pastor had had trouble with his false teeth and a fondness for whining.)

He led the singing.

“Come on now!” he laughed. “You’ve got to welcome your new preacher! The best way is to put a lot of lung-power into it
and sing like the dickens! You can all make some kind of noise. Make a lot!”

Himself he gave example, his deep voice rolling out in hymns of which he had always been fond: “I Love to Tell the Story”
and “My Faith Looks up to Thee.”

He prayed briefly—he was weary of prayers in which the priest ramblingly explained to God that God really was God. This
was, he said, his first day with the new flock. Let the Lord give him ways of showing them his love and his desire to serve
them.

Before his sermon he looked from brother to brother. He loved them all, that moment; they were his regiment, and he the
colonel; his ship’s crew, and he the skipper; his patients, and he the loyal physician. He began slowly, his great voice
swelling to triumphant certainty as he talked.

Voice, sureness, presence, training, power, he had them all. Never had he so well liked his rôle; never had he acted so
well; never had he known such sincerity of histrionic instinct.

He had solid doctrine for the older stalwarts. With comforting positiveness he preached that the atonement was the one
supreme fact in the world. It rendered the most sickly and threadbare the equals of kings and millionaires; it demanded of
the successful that they make every act a recognition of the atonement. For the young people he had plenty of anecdotes, and
he was not afraid to make them laugh.

While he did tell the gloomy incident of the boy who was drowned while fishing on Sunday, he also gave them the humorous
story of the lad who declared he wouldn’t go to school, “because it said in the Twenty-third Psalm that the Lord made him
lie down in green pastures, and he sure did prefer that to school!”

For all of them, but particularly for Cleo, sitting at the organ, her hands clasped in her lap, her eyes loyal, he winged
into poetry.

To preach the good news of the gospel, ah! That was not, as the wicked pretended, a weak, sniveling, sanctimonious thing!
It was a job for strong men and resolute women. For this, the Methodist missionaries had faced the ferocious lion and the
treacherous fevers of the jungle, the poisonous cold of the Arctic, the parching desert and the fields of battle. Were we to
be less heroic than they? Here, now, in Banjo Crossing, there was no triumph of business so stirring, no despairing need of
a sick friend so urgent, as the call to tell blinded and perishing sinners the necessity of repentance.

“Repentance—repentance—repentance—in the name of the Lord God!”

His superb voice trumpeted it, and in Cleo’s eyes were inspired tears.

Beyond controversy, it was the best sermon ever heard in Banjo Crossing. And they told him so as he cheerily shook hands
with them at the door. “Enjoyed your discourse a lot, Reverend!”

And Cleo came to him, her two hands out, and he almost kissed her.

Sunday School was held after morning service. Elmer determined that he was not going to attend Sunday School every
week—“not on your life; sneak in a nap before dinner”—but this morning he was affably and expansively there, encouraging the
little ones by a bright short talk in which he advised them to speak the truth, obey their fathers and mothers, and give
heed to the revelations of their teachers, such as Miss Mittie Lamb, the milliner, and Oscar Scholtz, manager of the potato
warehouse.

Banjo Crossing had not yet touched the modern Sunday School methods which, in the larger churches, in another ten years,
were to divide the pupils as elaborately as public school and to provide training-classes for the teachers. But at least
they had separated the children up to ten years from the older students, and of this juvenile department Cleo Benham was
superintendent.

Elmer watched her going from class to class; he saw how naturally and affectionately the children talked to her.

“She’d make a great wife and mother—a great wife for a preacher—a great wife for a bishop,” he noted.

Evening services at the Banjo Crossing Methodist Church had normally drawn less than forty people, but there were a
hundred tonight, when, fumblingly, Elmer broke away from old-fashioned church practise and began what was later to become
his famous Lively Sunday Evenings.

He chose the brighter hymns, “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” “Wonderful Words of Life,” “Brighten the Corner Where You
Are,” and the triumphant paean of “When the Roll is Called up Yonder, I’ll be There.” Instead of making them drone through
many stanzas, he had them sing one from each hymn. Then he startled them by shouting, “Now I don’t want any of you old
fellows to be shocked, or say it isn’t proper in church, because I’m going to get the spirit awakened and maybe get the old
devil on the run! Remember that the Lord who made the sunshine and the rejoicing hills must have been behind the fellows
that wrote the glad songs, so I want you to all pipe up good and lively with ‘Dixie’! Yes, SIR! Then, for the old fellows,
like me, we’ll have a stanza of that magnificent old reassurance of righteousness, ‘How Firm a Foundation.’”

They did look shocked, some of them; but the youngsters, the boys and the girls keeping an aseptic tryst in the back
pews, were delighted. He made them sing the chorus of ‘Dixie’ over and over, till all but one or two rheumatic saints looked
cheerful.

His text was from Galatians: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace.”

“Don’t you ever listen for one second,” he commanded, “to these wishy-washy fellows that carry water on both shoulders,
that love to straddle the fence, that are scared of the sternness of the good old-time Methodist doctrine and tell you that
details don’t mean anything, that dogmas and the discipline don’t mean anything. They do! Justification means something!
Baptism means something! It means something that the wicked and worldly stand for this horrible stinking tobacco and this
insane alcohol, which makes a man like a murderer, but we Methodists keep ourselves pure and unspotted and undefiled.

“But tonight, on this first day of getting acquainted with you, Brothers and Sisters, I don’t want to go into these
details. I want to get down to the fundamental thing which details merely carry out, and that fundamental thing—What is it?
What is it? What is it but Jesus Christ, and his love for each and every one of us!

“Love! Love! Love! How beauteous the very word! Not carnal love but the divine presence. What is Love? Listen! It is the
rainbow that stands out, in all its glorious many-colored hues, illuminating and making glad against the dark clouds of
life. It is the morning and the evening star, that in glad refulgence, there on the awed horizon, call Nature’s hearts to an
uplifted rejoicing in God’s marvelous firmament! Round about the cradle of the babe, sleeping so quietly while o’er him
hangs in almost agonized adoration his loving mother, shines the miracle of Love, and at the last sad end, comforting the
hearts that bear its immortal permanence, round even the quiet tomb, shines Love.

“What is great art—and I am not speaking of ordinary pictures but of those celebrated Old Masters with their great moral
lessons— what is the mother of art, the inspiration of the poet, the patriot, the philosopher, and the great man of affairs,
be he business man or statesman—yes, what inspires their every effort save Love?

“Oh, do you not sometimes hear, stealing o’er the plains at dawn, coming as it were from some far distant secret place, a
sound of melody? When our dear sister here plays the offertory, do you not seem sometimes to catch the distant rustle of the
wings of cherubim? And what is music, lovely, lovely music, what is fair melody? Ah, music, ’tis the voice of Love! Ah, ’tis
the magician that makes right royal kings out of plain folks like us! ’Tis the perfume of the wondrous flower, ’tis the
strength of the athlete, strong and mighty to endure ‘mid the heat and dust of the valorous conquest. Ah, Love, Love, Love!
Without it, we are less than beasts; with it, earth is heaven and we are as the gods!

“Yes, that is what Love—created by Christ Jesus and conveyed through all the generations by his church, particularly, it
seems to me, by the great, broad, democratic, liberal brotherhood of the Methodist Church—that is what it means to us.

“I am reminded of an incident in my early youth, while I was in the university. There was a young man in my class—I will
not give you his name except to say that we called him Jim—a young man pleasing to the eye, filled with every possibility
for true deep Christian service, but alas! so beset with the boyish pride of mere intellect, of mere smart-aleck egotism,
that he was unwilling to humble himself before the source of all intellect and accept Jesus as his savior.

“I was very fond of Jim—in fact I had been willing to go and room with him in the hope of bringing him to his senses and
getting him to embrace salvation. But he was a man who had read books by folks like Ingersoll and Thomas Paine—fool,
swell-headed folks that thought they knew more than Almighty God! He would quote their polluted and devil-inspired ravings
instead of listening to the cool healing stream that gushes blessedly forth from the Holy Bible. Well, I argued and argued
and argued—I guess that shows I was pretty young and foolish myself! But one day I was inspired to something bigger and
better than any arguments.

“I just said to Jim, all of a sudden, ‘Jim,’ I said, ‘do you love your father?’ (A fine old Christian gentleman his
father was, too, a country doctor, with that heroism, that self-sacrifice, that wide experience which the country doctor
has.) ‘Do you love your old dad?’ I asked him.

“Naturally, Jim was awful’ fond of his father, and he was kind of hurt that I should have asked him.

“‘Sure, of course I do!’ he says. ‘Well, Jim,’ I says, ‘does your father love you?’ ‘Why, of course he does,’ said Jim.
‘Then look here, Jim,’ I said; ‘if your earthly father can love you, how much more must your Father in Heaven, who created
all Love, how much more must he care and yearn for you!’

“Well, sir, that knocked him right over. He forgot all the smart-aleck things he’d been reading. He just looked at me,
and I could see a tear quivering in the lad’s eyes as he said, ‘I see how you mean, now, and I want to say, friend, that I’m
going to accept Jesus Christ as my lord and master!’

“Oh, yes, yes, yes, how beautiful it is, the golden glory of God’s Love! Do you not FEEL it? I mean that! I don’t mean
just a snuffling, lazy, mechanical acceptance, but a passionate—”