III
The climactic meeting of the Annual Prayer Week, to be addressed by President Quarles, four ministers, and a rich trustee who was in the pearl-button business, with Judson Roberts as star soloist, was not held at the Y.M.C.A. but at the largest auditorium in town, the Baptist Church, with hundreds of townpeople joining the collegians.
The church was a welter of brownstone, with Moorish arches and an immense star-shaped window not yet filled with stained glass.
Elmer hoped to be late enough to creep in inconspicuously, but as his mother and he straggled up to the Romanesque portico, students were still outside, chattering. He was certain they were whispering, “There he is—Hellcat Gantry. Say, is it really true he’s under conviction of sin? I thought he cussed out the church more’n anybody in college.”
Meek though Elmer had been under instruction by Jim and threats by Eddie and yearning by his mother, he was not normally given to humility, and he looked at his critics defiantly. “I’ll show ’em! If they think I’m going to sneak in—”
He swaggered down almost to the front pews, to the joy of his mother, who had been afraid that as usual he would hide in the rear, handy to the door if the preacher should become personal.
There was a great deal of decoration in the church, which had been endowed by a zealous alumnus after making his strike in Alaskan boardinghouses during the gold-rush. There were Egyptian pillars with gilded capitals, on the ceiling were gilt stars and clouds more woolen than woolly, and the walls were painted cheerily in three strata—green, watery blue, and khaki. It was an echoing and gaping church, and presently it was packed, the aisles full. Professors with string mustaches and dog-eared Bibles, men students in sweaters or flannel shirts, earnest young women students in homemade muslin with modest ribbons, over-smiling old maids of the town, venerable saints from the back-country with beards which partly hid the fact that they wore collars without ties, old women with billowing shoulders, irritated young married couples with broods of babies who crawled, slid, bellowed, and stared with embarrassing wonder at bachelors.
Five minutes later Elmer would not have had a seat down front. Now he could not escape. He was packed in between his mother and a wheezing fat man, and in the aisle beside his pew stood evangelical tailors and ardent schoolteachers.
The congregation swung into “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder” and Elmer gave up his frenzied but impractical plans for escape. His mother nestled happily beside him, her hand proudly touching his sleeve, and he was stirred by the march and battle of the hymn:
When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound, and time shall be no more,
And the morning breaks eternal, bright and far.—
They stood for the singing of “Shall We Gather at the River?” Elmer inarticulately began to feel his community with these humble, aspiring people—his own prairie tribe: this gaunt carpenter, a good fellow, full of friendly greetings; this farm-wife, so courageous, channeled by pioneer labor; this classmate, an admirable basketball player, yet now chanting beatifically, his head back, his eyes closed, his voice ringing. Elmer’s own people. Could he be a traitor to them, could he resist the current of their united belief and longing?
Yes, we’ll gather at the river,
The beautiful, the beautiful river,
Gather with the saints at the river
That flows by the throne of God.
Could he endure it to be away from them, in the chill void of Jim Lefferts’ rationalizing, on that day when they should be rejoicing in the warm morning sunshine by the river rolling to the imperishable Throne?
And his voice—he had merely muttered the words of the first hymn—boomed out ungrudgingly:
Soon our pilgrimage will cease; Soon our happy hearts will quiver With the melody of peace.
His mother stroked his sleeve. He remembered that she had maintained he was the best singer she had ever heard; that Jim Lefferts had admitted, “You certainly can make that hymn dope sound as if it meant something.” He noted that people near by looked about with pleasure when they heard his Big Ben dominate the cracked jangling.
The preliminaries merely warmed up the audience for Judson Roberts. Old Jud was in form. He laughed, he shouted, he knelt and wept with real tears, he loved everybody, he raced down into the audience and patted shoulders, and for the moment everybody felt that he was closer to them than their closest friends.
“Rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race,” was his text.
Roberts was really a competent athlete, and he really had skill in evoking pictures. He described the Chicago-Michigan game, and Elmer was lost in him, with him lived the moments of the scrimmage, the long run with the ball, the bleachers rising to him.
Roberts’ voice softened. He was pleading. He was not talking, he said, to weak men who needed coddling into the Kingdom, but to strong men, to rejoicing men, to men brave in armor. There was another sort of race more exhilarating than any game, and it led not merely to a score on a big board but to the making of a new world—it led not to newspaper paragraphs but to glory eternal. Dangerous—calling for strong men! Ecstatic—brimming with thrills! The team captained by Christ! No timid Jesus did he preach, but the adventurer who had joyed to associate with common men, with reckless fishermen, with captains and rulers, who had dared to face the soldiers in the garden, who had dared the myrmidons of Rome and death itself! Come! Who was gallant? Who had nerve? Who longed to live abundantly? Let them come!
They must confess their sins, they must repent, they must know their own weakness save as they were reborn in Christ. But they must confess not in heaven-pilfering weakness, but in training for the battle under the wind-torn banners of the Mighty Captain. Who would come? Who would come? Who was for vision and the great adventure?
He was among them, Judson Roberts, with his arms held out, his voice a bugle. Young men sobbed and knelt; a woman shrieked; people were elbowing the standers in the aisles and pushing forward to kneel in agonized happiness, and suddenly they were setting relentlessly on a bewildered Elmer Gantry, who had been betrayed into forgetting himself, into longing to be one with Judson Roberts.
His mother was wringing his hand, begging, “Oh, won’t you come? Won’t you make your old mother happy? Let yourself know the joy of surrender to Jesus!” She was weeping, old eyes puckered, and in her weeping was his every recollection of winter dawns when she had let him stay in bed and brought porridge to him across the icy floor; winter evenings when he had awakened to find her still stitching; and that confusing intimidating hour, in the abyss of his first memories, when he had seen her shaken beside a coffin that contained a cold monster in the shape of his father.
The basketball player was patting his other arm, begging, “Dear old Hellcat, you’ve never let yourself be happy! You’ve been lonely! Let yourself be happy with us! You know I’m no mollycoddle. Won’t you know the happiness of salvation with us?”
A thread-thin old man, very dignified, a man with secret eyes that had known battles, and mountain-valleys, was holding out his hands to Elmer, imploring with a humility utterly disconcerting, “Oh, come, come with us—don’t stand there making Jesus beg and beg—don’t leave the Christ that died for us standing out in the cold, begging!”
And, somehow, flashing through the crowd, Judson Roberts was with Elmer, honoring him beyond all the multitude, appealing for his friendship—Judson Roberts the gorgeous, beseeching:
“Are you going to hurt me, Elmer? Are you going to let me go away miserable and beaten, old man? Are you going to betray me like Judas, when I’ve offered you my Jesus as the most precious gift I can bring you? Are you going to slap me and defile me and hurt me? Come! Think of the joy of being rid of all those nasty little sins that you’ve felt so ashamed of! Won’t you come kneel with me, won’t you?”
His mother shrieked, “Won’t you, Elmer? With him and me? Won’t you make us happy? Won’t you be big enough to not be afraid? See how we’re all longing for you, praying for you!”
“Yes!” from around him, from strangers; and “Help me to follow you, Brother—I’ll go if you will!” Voices woven, thick, dove-white and terrifying black of mourning and lightning-colored, flung around him, binding him—His mother’s pleading, Judson Roberts’ tribute—
An instant he saw Jim Lefferts, and heard him insist: “Why, sure, course they believe it. They hypnotize themselves. But don’t let ’em hypnotize you!”
He saw Jim’s eyes, that for him alone veiled their bright harshness and became lonely, asking for comradeship. He struggled; with all the blubbering confusion of a small boy set on by his elders, frightened and overwhelmed, he longed to be honest, to be true to Jim—to be true to himself and his own good honest sins and whatsoever penalties they might carry. Then the visions were driven away by voices that closed over him like surf above an exhausted swimmer. Volitionless, marveling at the sight of himself as a pinioned giant, he was being urged forward, forced forward, his mother on one arm and Judson on the other, a rhapsodic mob following.
Bewildered. Miserable. … False to Jim.
But as he came to the row kneeling in front of the first pew, he had a thought that made everything all right. Yes! He could have both! He could keep Judson and his mother, yet retain Jim’s respect. He had only to bring Jim also to Jesus, then all of them would be together in beatitude!
Freed from misery by that revelation, he knelt, and suddenly his voice was noisy in confession, while the shouts of the audience, the ejaculations of Judson and his mother, exalted him to hot self-approval and made it seem splendidly right to yield to the mystic fervor.
He had but little to do with what he said. The willing was not his but the mob’s; the phrases were not his but those of the emotional preachers and hysterical worshipers whom he had heard since babyhood:
“O God, oh, I have sinned! My sins are heavy on me! I am unworthy of compassion! O Jesus, intercede for me! Oh, let thy blood that was shed for me be my salvation! O God, I do truly repent of my great sinning and I do long for the everlasting peace of thy bosom!”
“Oh, praise God,” from the multitude, and “Praise his holy name! Thank God, thank God, thank God! Oh, hallelujah, Brother, thank the dear loving God!”
He was certain that he would never again want to guzzle, to follow loose women, to blaspheme; he knew the rapture of salvation—yes, and of being the center of interest in the crowd.
Others about him were beating their foreheads, others were shrieking, “Lord, be merciful,” and one woman—he remembered her as a strange, repressed, mad-eyed special student who was not known to have any friends—was stretched out, oblivious of the crowd, jerking, her limbs twitching, her hands clenched, panting rhythmically.
But it was Elmer, tallest of the converts, tall as Judson Roberts, whom all the students and most of the townpeople found important, who found himself important.
His mother was crying, “Oh, this is the happiest hour of my life, dear! This makes up for everything!”
To be able to give her such delight!
Judson was clawing Elmer’s hand, whooping, “Liked to had you on the team at Chicago, but I’m a lot gladder to have you with me on Christ’s team! If you knew how proud I am!”
To be thus linked forever with Judson!
Elmer’s embarrassment was gliding into a robust self-satisfaction.
Then the others were crowding on him, shaking his hand, congratulating him: the football center, the Latin professor, the town grocer. President Quarles, his chin whisker vibrant and his shaven upper lip wiggling from side to side, was insisting, “Come, Brother Elmer, stand up on the platform and say a few words to us—you must—we all need it—we’re thrilled by your splendid example!”
Elmer was not quite sure how he got through the converts, up the steps to the platform. He suspected afterward that Judson Roberts had done a good deal of trained pushing.
He looked down, something of his panic returning. But they were sobbing with affection for him. The Elmer Gantry who had for years pretended that he relished defying the whole college had for those same years desired popularity. He had it now—popularity, almost love, almost reverence, and he felt overpoweringly his role as leading man.
He was stirred to more flamboyant confession:
“Oh, for the first time I know the peace of God! Nothing I have ever done has been right, because it didn’t lead to the way and the truth! Here I thought I was a good church-member, but all the time I hadn’t seen the real light. I’d never been willing to kneel down and confess myself a miserable sinner. But I’m kneeling now, and, oh, the blessedness of humility!”
He wasn’t, to be quite accurate, kneeling at all; he was standing up, very tall and broad, waving his hands; and though what he was experiencing may have been the blessedness of humility, it sounded like his announcements of an ability to lick anybody in any given saloon. But he was greeted with flaming hallelujahs, and he shouted on till he was rapturous and very sweaty:
“Come! Come to him now! Oh, it’s funny that I who’ve been so great a sinner could dare to give you his invitation, but he’s almighty and shall prevail, and he giveth his sweet tidings through the mouths of babes and sucklings and the most unworthy, and lo, the strong shall be confounded and the weak exalted in his sight!”
It was all, the Mithraic phrasing, as familiar as “Good morning” or “How are you?” to the audience, yet he must have put new violence into it, for instead of smiling at the recency of his ardor they looked at him gravely, and suddenly a miracle was beheld.
Ten minutes after his own experience, Elmer made his first conversion.
A pimply youth, long known as a poolroom tout, leaped up, his greasy face working, shrieked, “O God, forgive me!” butted in frenzy through the crowd, ran to the mourner’s bench, lay with his mouth frothing in convulsion.
Then the hallelujahs rose till they drowned Elmer’s accelerated pleading, then Judson Roberts stood with his arm about Elmer’s shoulder, then Elmer’s mother knelt with a light of paradise on her face, and they closed the meeting in a maniac pealing of
Draw me nearer, blessed Lord,
To thy precious bleeding side.
Elmer felt himself victorious over life and king of righteousness.
But it had been only the devoted, the people who had come early and taken front seats, of whom he had been conscious in his transports. The students who had remained at the back of the church now loitered outside the door in murmurous knots, and as Elmer and his mother passed them, they stared, they even chuckled, and he was suddenly cold. …
It was hard to give heed to his mother’s wails of joy all the way to her boardinghouse.
“Now don’t you dare think of getting up early to see me off on the train,” she insisted. “All I have to do is just to carry my little valise across the street. You’ll need your sleep, after all this stirrin’ up you’ve had tonight—I was so proud—I’ve never known anybody to really wrestle with the Lord like you did. Oh, Elmy, you’ll stay true? You’ve made your old mother so happy! All my life I’ve sorrowed, I’ve waited, I’ve prayed and now I shan’t ever sorrow again! Oh, you will stay true?”
He threw the last of his emotional reserve into a ringing, “You bet I will, Ma!” and kissed her good night.
He had no emotion left with which to face walking alone, in a cold and realistic night, down a street not of shining columns but of cottages dumpy amid the bleak snow and unfriendly under the bitter stars.
His plan of saving Jim Lefferts, his vision of Jim with reverent and beatific eyes, turned into a vision of Jim with extremely irate eyes and a lot to say. With that vanishment his own glory vanished.
“Was I,” he wondered, “just a plain damn fool?
“Jim warned me they’d nab me if I lost my head.
“Now I suppose I can’t ever even smoke again without going to hell.”
But he wanted a smoke. Right now!
He had a smoke.
It comforted him but little as he fretted on:
“There wasn’t any fake about it! I really did repent all these darn fool sins. Even smoking—I’m going to cut it out. I did feel the—the peace of God.
“But can I keep up this speed? Christ! I can’t do it! Never take a drink or anything—
“I wonder if the Holy Ghost really was there and getting after me? I did feel different! I did! Or was it just because Judson and Ma and all those Christers were there whooping it up—
“Jud Roberts kidded me into it. With all his Big Brother stuff. Prob’ly pulls it everywhere he goes. Jim’ll claim I—Oh, damn Jim, too! I got some rights! None of his business if I come out and do the fair square thing! And they did look up to me when I gave them the invitation! It went off fine and dandy! And that kid coming right up and getting saved. Mighty few fellows ever’ve pulled off a conversion as soon after their own conversion as I did! Moody or none of ’em. I’ll bet it busts the records! Yes, sir, maybe they’re right. Maybe the Lord has got some great use for me, even if I ain’t always been all I might of been … someways … but I was never mean or tough or anything like that … just had a good time.
“Jim—what right’s he got telling me where I head in? Trouble with him is, he thinks he knows it all. I guess these wise old coots that’ve written all these books about the Bible, I guess they know more’n one smart-aleck Kansas agnostic!
“Yes, sir! The whole crowd! Turned to me like I was an All-American preacher!
“Wouldn’t be so bad to be a preacher if you had a big church and—Lot easier than digging out law-cases and having to put it over a jury and another lawyer maybe smarter’n you are.
“The crowd have to swallow what you tell ’em in a pulpit, and no backtalk or cross-examination allowed!”
For a second he snickered, but:
“Not nice to talk that way. Even if a fellow don’t do what’s right himself, no excuse for his sneering at fellows that do, like preachers. … There’s where Jim makes his mistake.
“Not worthy to be a preacher. But if Jim Lefferts thinks for one single solitary second that I’m afraid to be a preacher because he pulls a lot of gaff—I guess I know how I felt when I stood up and had all them folks hollering and rejoicing—I guess I know whether I experienced salvation or not! And I don’t require any James Blaine Lefferts to tell me, neither!”
Thus for an hour of dizzy tramping; now colder with doubt than with the prairie wind, now winning back some of the exaltation of his spiritual adventure, but always knowing that he had to confess to an inexorable Jim.