III
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. 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 downstairs 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 treetops; 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, but me—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 hardworking 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! I am Sharon 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 sleepwalker. “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 sleepwalker 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.