Elmer Gantry (40 page)

Elmer considered, “Well, I’ve given those poor old birds some cheerfulness to go on with. By golly, there’s nothing more
important than to give people some happiness and faith to cheer them along life’s dark pathway.”

He was passing the veranda café. At a pale green table was a man who sat next to Elmer in the dining salon. With him were
three men unknown, and each had a whisky-and-soda in front of him.

“Well, I see you’re keeping your strength up!” Elmer said forgivingly.

“Sure, you betcha,” said his friend of the salon. “Don’t you wanta sit down and have a jolt with us?”

Elmer sat, and when the steward stood at ruddy British attention, he gave voice:

“Well, of course, being a preacher, I’m not a big husky athalete like you boys, so all I can stand is just a ginger ale.”
To the steward: “Do you keep anything like that, buddy, or have you only got hooch for big strong men?”

When Elmer explained to the purser that he would be willing to act as chairman of the concert, with the most perspiratory
regret the purser said that the Rt. Hon. Lionel Smith had, unfortunately, already been invited to take the chair.

Cleo had not been more obnoxiously colorless than usual, but she had been seasick, and Elmer saw that it had been an
error to bring her along. He had not talked to her an hour all the way. There had been so many interesting and broadening
contacts; the man from China, who gave him enough ideas for a dozen missionary sermons; the professor from Higgins
Presbyterian Institute, who explained that no really up-to-date scientist accepted evolution; the pretty journalist lady who
needed consolation.

But now, alone with Cleo in the compartment of a train from Liverpool to London, Elmer made up for what she might have
considered neglect by explaining the difficult aspects of a foreign country:

“Heh! English certainly are behind the times! Think of having these dingy coops instead of a Pullman car, so you can see
your fellow-passengers and get acquainted. Just goes to show the way this country is still riddled with caste.

“Don’t think so much of these towns. Kind of pretty, cottages with vines and all that, but you don’t get any feeling that
they’re up and coming and forward-looking, like American burgs. I tell you there’s one thing—and don’t know’s I’ve ever seen
anybody bring this out—I might make a sermon out of it—one of the big advantages of foreign travel is, it makes you a lot
more satisfied with being an American!

“Here we are, coming into London, I guess. Cer’nly is smoky, isn’t it.

“Well, by golly, so THIS is what they call a depot in London! Well, I don’t think much of it! Just look at all those
dinky little trains. Why, say, an American engineer would be ashamed to take advantage of child-sized trains like them! And
no marble anywhere in the depot!”

The page who took their bags up to their room in the Savoy was a brisk and smiling boy with fabulous pink cheeks.

“Say, buddy,” said the Rev. Dr. Gantry, “what do you pull down here?”

“Sorry, sir, I don’t think I quite understand, sir.”

“Whadda you make? How much do they pay you?”

“Oh. Oh, they pay me very decently, sir. Is there anything else I can do, sir? Thank you, sir.”

When the page was gone, Elmer complained, “Yuh, fine friendly kid THAT bell-boy, is, and can’t hardly understand the
English language! Well, I’m glad we’re seeing the Old Country, but if folks aren’t going to be any friendlier than HE is, I
see where we’ll be mighty darn glad to get back. Why, say, if he’d of been an American bell-boy, we’d of jawed along for an
hour, and I’d of learned something. Well, come on, come on! Get your hat on, and let’s go out and give the town the
once-over.”

They walked along the Strand.

“Say,” Elmer said portentously, “do you notice that? The cops got straps under their chins! Well, well, that certainly is
different!”

“Yes, isn’t it!” said Cleo.

“But I don’t think so much of this street. I always heard it was a famous one, but these stores—why, say, we got a dozen
streets in Zenith, say nothing of N’ York, that got better stores. No git up and git to these foreigners. Certainly does
make a fellow glad he’s an American!”

They came, after exploring Swan & Edgar’s, to St. James’s Palace.

“Now,” said Elmer knowingly, “that certainly is an ancient site. Wonder what it is? Some kind of a castle, I guess.”

To a passing policeman: “Say, excuse me, Cap’n, but could you tell me what that brick building is?”

“St. James’s Palace, sir. You’re an American? The Prince of Wales lives there, sir.”

“Is that a fact! D’you hear that, Cleo? Well, sir, that’s certainly something to remember!”

When he regarded the meager audience at Brompton Road Chapel, Elmer had an inspiration.

All the way over he had planned to be poetic in his first London sermon. He was going to say that it was the strong man,
the knight in armor, who was most willing to humble himself before God; and to say also that Love was the bow on life’s dark
cloud, and the morning and evening star, both. But in a second of genius he cast it away, and reflected, “No! What they want
is a good, pioneering, roughneck American!”

And that he was, splendidly.

“Folks,” he said, “it’s mighty nice of you to let a plain American come and bring his message to you. But I hope you
don’t expect any Oxford College man. All I’ve got to give you—and may the dear Lord help my feebleness in giving you even
that—is the message that God reigns among the grim frontiersmen of America, in cabin and trackless wild, even as he reigns
here in your magnificent and towering city.

“It is true that just at the present moment, through no virtue of my own, I am the pastor of a church even larger than
your beautiful chapel here. But, ah, I long for the day when the general superintendent will send me back to my own beloved
frontier, to— Let me try, in my humble way, to give you a picture of the work I knew as a youth, that you may see how
closely the grace of God binds your world-compelling city to the humblest vastnesses.

“I was the pastor—as a youngster, ignorant of everything save the fact that the one urgent duty of the preacher is to
carry everywhere the Good News of the Atonement—of a log chapel in a frontier settlement called Schoenheim. I came at
nightfall, weary and anhungered, a poor circuit-rider, to the house of Barney Bains, a pioneer, living all alone in his log
cabin. I introduced myself. ‘I am Brother Gantry, the Wesleyan preacher,” I said. Well, he stared at me, a wild look in his
eyes, beneath his matted hair, and slowly he spoke:

“‘Brother,’ he said, ‘I ain’t seen no strangers for nigh onto a year, and I’m mighty pleased to see you.’

“‘You must have been awfully lonely, friend,’ I said.

“‘No, sir, not me!’ he said.

“‘How’s that?’ I said.

“‘Because Jesus has been with me all the time!’”

They almost applauded.

They told him afterward that he was immense, and invited him to address them whenever he returned to London.

“Wait,” he reflected, “till I get back to Zenith and tell old Potts and Hickenlooper THAT!”

As they rode to the hotel on the ‘bus, Cleo sighed, “Oh, you were wonderful! But I never knew you had such a wild time of
it in your first pastorate.”

“Oh, well, it was nothing. A man that’s a real man has to take the rough with the smooth.”

“That’s so!”

He stood impatiently on a corner of the Rue de la Paix, while Cleo gaped into the window of a perfumer. (She was too well
trained to dream of asking him to buy expensive perfume.) He looked at the façades in the Place Vendôme.

“Not much class—too kind of plain,” he decided.

A little greasy man edged up to him, covertly sliding toward him a pack of postcards, and whispered, “Lovely cards—only
two francs each.”

“Oh,” said Elmer intelligently, “you speak English.”

“Sure. All language.”

Then Elmer saw the topmost card and he was galvanized.

“Whee! Golly! Two francs apiece?” He seized the pack, gloating— But Cleo was suddenly upon him, and he handed back the
cards, roaring, “You get out of here or I’ll call a cop! Trying to sell obscene pictures—and to a minister of the gospel!
Cleo, these Europeans have dirty minds!”

It was on the steamer home that he met and became intimate with J. E. North, the renowned vice-slayer, executive
secretary of the National Association for the Purification of Art and the Press— affectionately known through all the
evangelical world as “the Napap.” Mr. North was not a clergyman (though he was a warm Presbyterian layman), but no clergyman
in the country had more furiously pursued wickedness, more craftily forced congressmen, through threats in their home
districts, to see legislation in the same reasonable manner as himself. For several sessions of Congress he had backed a
bill for a federal censorship of all fiction, plays, and moving pictures, with a penitentiary sentence for any author
mentioning adultery even by implication, ridiculing prohibition, or making light of any Christian sect or minister.

The bill had always been defeated, but it was gaining more votes in every session. . . .

Mr. North was a tight-mouthed, thin gentleman. He liked the earnestness, uprightness, and vigor of the Reverend Dr.
Gantry, and all day they walked the deck or sat talking—anywhere save in the smoking-room, where fools were befouling their
intellects with beer. He gave Elmer an inside view of the great new world of organized opposition to immorality; he spoke
intimately of the leaders of that world—the executives of the Anti–Saloon League, the Lord’s Day Alliance, the Watch and
Ward Society, the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals—modern St. Johns, armed with card
indices.

He invited Elmer to lecture for him.

“We need men like you, Dr. Gantry,” said Mr. North, “men with rigid standards of decency, and yet with a physical power
which will indicate to the poor misguided youth of this awful flask-toting age that morality is not less but more virile
than immorality. And I think your parishioners will appreciate your being invited to address gatherings in places like New
York and Chicago now and then.”

“Oh, I’m not looking for appreciation. It’s just that if I can do anything in my power to strike a blow at the forces of
evil,” said Elmer, “I shall be most delighted to help you.”

“Do you suppose you could address the Detroit Y. M. C. A. on October fourth?”

“Well, it’s my wife’s birthday, and we’ve always made rather a holiday of it—we’re proud of being an old-fashioned homey
family— but I know that Cleo wouldn’t want that to stand in the way of my doing anything I can to further the Kingdom.”

So Elmer came, though tardily, to the Great Idea which was to revolutionize his life and bring him eternal and splendid
fame.

That shabby Corsican artillery lieutenant and author, Bonaparte, first conceiving that he might be the ruler of
Europe—Darwin seeing dimly the scheme of evolution—Paolo realizing that all of life was nothing but an irradiation of
Francesca—Newton pondering on the falling apple—Paul of Tarsus comprehending that a certain small Jewish sect might be the
new religion of the doubting Greeks and Romans—Keats beginning to write “The Eve of St. Agnes”—none of these men,
transformed by a Great Idea from mediocrity to genius, was more remarkable than Elmer Gantry of Paris, Kansas, when he
beheld the purpose for which the heavenly powers had been training him.

He was walking the deck—but only in the body, for his soul was soaring among the stars—he was walking the deck alone,
late at night, clenching his fists and wanting to shout as he saw it all clearly.

He would combine in one association all the moral organizations in America—perhaps, later, in the entire world. He would
be the executive of that combination; he would be the super-president of the United States, and some day the dictator of the
world.

Combine them all. The Anti–Saloon League, the W. C. T. U., and the other organizations fighting alcohol. The Napap and
the other Vice Societies doing such magnificent work in censoring unmoral novels and paintings and motion pictures and
plays. The Anti–Cigarette League. The associations lobbying for anti-evolution laws in the state legislatures. The
associations making so brave a fight against Sunday baseball, Sunday movies, Sunday golfing, Sunday motoring, and the other
abominations whereby the Sabbath was desecrated and the preachers’ congregations and collections were lessened. The
fraternities opposing Romanism. The societies which gallantly wanted to make it a crime to take the name of the Lord in vain
or to use the nine Saxon physiological monosyllables. And all the rest.

Combine the lot. They were pursuing the same purpose—to make life conform to the ideals agreed upon by the principal
Christian Protestant denominations. Divided, they were comparatively feeble; united, they would represent thirty million
Protestant church-goers; they would have such a treasury and such a membership that they would no longer have to coax
Congress and the state legislatures into passing moral legislation, but in a quiet way they would merely state to the
representatives of the people what they wanted, and get it.

And the head of this united organization would be the Warwick of America, the man behind the throne, the man who would
send for presidents, of whatever party, and give orders . . . and that man, perhaps the most powerful man since the
beginning of history, was going to be Elmer Gantry. Not even Napoleon or Alexander had been able to dictate what a whole
nation should wear and eat and say and think. That, Elmer Gantry was about to do.

“A BISHOP? ME? A Wes Toomis? Hell, don’t be silly! I’m going to be the emperor of America—maybe of the world. I’m glad
I’ve got this idea so early, when I’m only forty-three. I’ll do it! I’ll do it!” Elmer exulted. “Now let’s see: The first
step is to kid this J. S. North along, and do whatever he wants me to—until it comes time to kick him out—and get a church
in New York, so they’ll know I’m A-1. . . . My God, and Jim Lefferts tried to keep me from becoming a preacher!”