I
Elmer Gantry was twenty-eight and for two years he had been a traveling salesman for the Pequot Company.
Harrows and rakes and corn-planters; red plows and gilt-striped green wagons; catalogues and order-lists; offices glassed off from dim warehouses; shirt-sleeved dealers on high stools at high desks; the bar at the corner; stifling small hotels and lunchrooms; waiting for trains half the night in foul boxes of junction stations, where the brown slatted benches were an agony to his back; trains, trains, trains; trains and timetables and joyous return to his headquarters in Denver; a drunk, a theater, and service in a big church.
He wore a checked suit, a brown derby, striped socks, the huge ring of gold serpents and an opal which he had bought long ago, flower-decked ties, and what he called “fancy vests”—garments of yellow with red spots, of green with white stripes, of silk or daring chamois.
He had had a series of little loves, but none of them important enough to continue.
He was not unsuccessful. He was a good talker, a magnificent hand-shaker, his word could often be depended on, and he remembered most of the price-lists and all of the new smutty stories. In the office at Denver he was popular with “the boys.” He had one infallible “stunt”—a burlesque sermon. It was known that he had studied to be a preacher, but had courageously decided that it was no occupation for a “real two-fisted guy,” and that he had “told the profs where they got off.” A promising and commendable fellow; conceivably sales-manager some day.
Whatever his dissipations, Elmer continued enough exercise to keep his belly down and his shoulders up. He had been shocked by Deacon Bains’ taunt that he was growing soft, and every morning in his hotel room he unhumorously did calisthenics for fifteen minutes; evenings he bowled or boxed in Y.M.C.A. gymnasiums, or, in towns large enough, solemnly swam up and down tanks like a white porpoise. He felt lusty, and as strong as in Terwillinger days.
Yet Elmer was not altogether happy.
He appreciated being free of faculty rules, free of the guilt which in seminary days had followed his sprees at Monarch, free of the incomprehensible debates of Harry Zenz and Frank Shallard, yet he missed leading the old hymns, and the sound of his own voice, the sense of his own power, as he held an audience by his sermon. Always on Sunday evenings (except when he had an engagement with a waitress or a chambermaid) he went to the evangelical church nearest his hotel. He enjoyed criticizing the sermon professionally.
“Golly, I could put it all over that poor boob! The straight gospel is all right, but if he’d only stuck in a couple literary allusions, and lambasted the saloon-keepers more, he’d ’ve had ’em all het up.”
He sang so powerfully that despite a certain tobacco and whisky odor the parsons always shook hands with extra warmth, and said they were glad to see you with us this evening, Brother.
When he encountered really successful churches, his devotion to the business became a definite longing to return to preaching: he ached to step up, push the minister out of his pulpit, and take charge, instead of sitting back there unnoticed and unadmired, as though he were an ordinary layman.
“These chumps would be astonished if they knew what I am!” he reflected.
After such an experience it was vexatious on Monday morning to talk with a droning implement-dealer about discounts on manure-spreaders; it was sickening to wait for train-time in a cuspidor-filled hotel lobby when he might have been in a church office superior with books, giving orders to pretty secretaries and being expansive and helpful to consulting sinners. He was only partly solaced by being able to walk openly into a saloon and shout, “Straight rye, Bill.”
On Sunday evening in a Western Kansas town he ambled to a shabby little church and read on the placard outside:
This Morning: The Meaning of Redemption
This Evening: Is Dancing of the Devil?
First Baptist Church
Pastor:
The Rev. Edward Fislinger, B.A., B.D.
“Oh, Gawd!” protested Elmer. “Eddie Fislinger! About the kind of burg he would land in! A lot he knows about the meaning of redemption or any other dogma, that human woodchuck! Or about dancing! If he’d ever been with me in Denver and shaken a hoof at Billy Portifero’s place, he’d have something to hand out. Fislinger—must be the same guy. I’ll sit down front and put his show on the fritz!”
Eddie Fislinger’s church was an octagonal affair, with the pulpit in one angle, an arrangement which produced a fascinating, rather dizzy effect, reminiscent of the doctrine of predestination. The interior was of bright yellow, hung with many placards: “Get Right With God,” and “Where Will You Spend Eternity?” and “The Wisdom of This World is Foolishness with God.” The Sunday School Register behind the pulpit communicated the tidings that the attendance today had been forty-one, as against only thirty-nine last week, and the collection eighty-nine cents, as against only seventy-seven.
The usher, a bricklayer in a clean collar, was impressed by Elmer’s checked suit and starched red-speckled shirt and took him to the front row.
Eddie flushed most satisfactorily when he saw Elmer from the pulpit, started to bow, checked it, looked in the general direction of Heaven, and tried to smile condescendingly. He was nervous at the beginning of his sermon, but apparently he determined that his attack on sin—which hitherto had been an academic routine with no relation to any of his appallingly virtuous flock—might be made real. With his squirrel-toothed and touching earnestness he looked down at Elmer and as good as told him to go to hell and be done with it. But he thought better of it, and concluded that God might be able to give even Elmer Gantry another chance if Elmer stopped drinking, smoking, blaspheming, and wearing checked suits. (If he did not refer to Elmer by name, he certainly did by poisonous glances.)
Elmer was angry, then impressively innocent, then bored. He examined the church and counted the audience—twenty-seven excluding Eddie and his wife. (There was no question but that the young woman looking adoringly up from the front pew was Eddie’s consort. She had the pitifully starved and home-tailored look of a preacher’s wife.) By the end of the sermon, Elmer was being sorry for Eddie. He sang the closing hymn, “He’s the Lily of the Valley,” with a fine unctuous grace, coming down powerfully on the jubilant “Hallelujah,” and waited to shake hands with Eddie forgivingly.
“Well, well, well,” they both said; and “What are you doing in these parts?” and Eddie: “Wait till everybody’s gone—must have a good old-fashioned chin with you, old fellow!”
As he walked with the Fislingers to the parsonage, a block away, and sat with them in the living-room, Elmer wanted to be a preacher again, take the job away from Eddie and do it expertly; yet he was repulsed by the depressing stinginess of Eddie’s life. His own hotel bedrooms were drab enough, but they were free of nosey parishioners, and they were as luxurious as this parlor with its rain-blotched ceiling, bare pine floor, sloping chairs, and perpetual odor of diapers. There were already, in two years of Eddie’s marriage, two babies, looking as though they were next-door to having been conceived without sin; and there was a perfectly blank-faced sister-in-law who cared for the children during services.
Elmer wanted to smoke, and for all his training in the eternal mysteries he could not decide whether it would be more interesting to annoy Eddie by smoking or to win him by refraining.
He smoked, and wished he hadn’t.
Eddie noticed it, and his reedy wife noticed it, and the sister-in-law gaped at it, and they labored at pretending they hadn’t.
Elmer felt large and sophisticated and prosperous in their presence, like a city broker visiting a farmer cousin and wondering which of his tales of gilded towers would be simple enough for belief.
Eddie gave him the news of Mizpah. Frank Shallard had a small church in a town called Catawba, the other end of the state of Winnemac from the seminary. There had been some difficulty over his ordination, for he had been shaky about even so clear and proven a fact as the virgin birth. But his father and Dean Trosper had vouched for him, and Frank had been ordained. Harry Zenz had a large church in a West Virginia mining town. Wallace Umstead, the physical instructor, was “doing fine” in the Y.M.C.A. Professor Bruno Zechlin was dead, poor fellow.
“Whatever became of Horace Carp?” asked Elmer.
“Well, that’s the strangest thing of all. Horace’s gone into the Episcopal Church, like he always said he would.”
“Well, well, zatta fact!”
“Yes-sir, his father died just after he graduated, and he up and turned Episcopalian and took a year in General, and now they say he’s doing pretty good, and he’s high-church as all get-out.”
“Well, you seem to have a good thing of it here, Eddie. Nice church.”
“Well, it isn’t so big, but they’re awful fine people. And everything’s going fine. I haven’t increased the membership so much, but what I’m trying to do is strengthen the present membership in the faith, and then when I feel each of them is a center of inspiration, I’ll be ready to start an evangelistic campaign, and you’ll see that ole church boom—yes-sir—just double overnight. … If they only weren’t so slow about paying my salary and the mortgage. … Fine solid people, really saved, but they are just the least little bit tight with the money.”
“If you could see the way my cookstove’s broken and the sink needs painting,” said Mrs. Fislinger—her chief utterance of the evening.
Elmer felt choked and imprisoned. He escaped. At the door Eddie held both his hands and begged, “Oh, Elm, I’ll never give up till I’ve brought you back! I’m going to pray. I’ve seen you under conviction. I know what you can do!”
Fresh air, a defiant drink of rye, loud laughter, taking a train—Elmer enjoyed it after this stuffiness. Already Eddie had lost such devout fires as he had once shown in the Y.M.C.A.: Already he was old, settled down, without conceivable adventure, waiting for death.
Yet Eddie had said—
Startled, he recalled that he was still a Baptist minister! For all of Trosper’s opposition, he could preach. He felt with superstitious discomfort, Eddie’s incantation, “I’ll never give up till I’ve brought you back.”
And—just to take Eddie’s church and show what he could do with it! By God he’d bring those hicks to time and make ’em pay up!
He flitted across the state to see his mother.
His disgrace at Mizpah had, she said, nearly killed her. With tremulous hope she now heard him promise that maybe when he’d seen the world and settled down, he might go back into the ministry.
In a religious mood (which fortunately did not prevent his securing some telling credit-information by oiling a bookkeeper with several drinks) he came to Sautersville, Nebraska, an ugly, enterprising, industrial town of 20,000. And in that religious mood he noted the placards of a woman evangelist, one Sharon Falconer, a prophetess of whom he had heard.
The clerk in the hotel, the farmers about the implement warehouse, said that Miss Falconer was holding union meetings in a tent, with the support of most of the Protestant churches in town; they asserted that she was beautiful and eloquent, that she took a number of assistants with her, that she was “the biggest thing that ever hit this burg,” that she was comparable to Moody, to Gipsy Smith, to Sam Jones, to J. Wilbur Chapman, to this new baseball evangelist, Billy Sunday.
“That’s nonsense. No woman can preach the gospel,” declared Elmer, as an expert.
But he went, that evening, to Miss Falconer’s meeting.
The tent was enormous; it would seat three thousand people, and another thousand could be packed in standing-room. It was nearly filled when Elmer arrived and elbowed his majestic way forward. At the front of the tent was an extraordinary structure, altogether different from the platform-pulpit-American-flag arrangement of the stock evangelist. It was a pyramidal structure, of white wood with gilded legs, affording three platforms; one for the choir, one higher up for a row of seated local clergy; and at the top a small platform with a pulpit shaped like a shell and painted like a rainbow. Swarming over it all were lilies, roses and vines.
“Great snakes! Regular circus layout! Just what you’d expect from a fool woman evangelist!” decided Elmer.
The top platform was still unoccupied; presumably it was to set off the charms of Miss Sharon Falconer.
The mixed choir, with their gowns and mortarboards, chanted “Shall We Gather at the River?” A young man, slight, too good-looking, too arched of lip, wearing a priest’s waistcoat and collar turned round, read from Acts at a stand on the second platform. He was an Oxonian, and it was almost the first time that Elmer had heard an Englishman read.
“Huh! Willy-boy, that’s what he is! This outfit won’t get very far. Too much skirts. No punch. No good old-fashioned gospel to draw the customers,” scoffed Elmer.
A pause. Everyone waited, a little uneasy. Their eyes went to the top platform. Elmer gasped. Coming from some refuge behind the platform, coming slowly, her beautiful arms outstretched to them, appeared a saint. She was young, Sharon Falconer, surely not thirty, stately, slender and tall; and in her long slim face, her black eyes, her splendor of black hair, was rapture or boiling passion. The sleeves of her straight white robe, with its ruby girdle, were slashed, and fell away from her arms as she drew everyone to her.
“God!” prayed Elmer Gantry, and that instant his planless life took on plan and resolute purpose. He was going to have Sharon Falconer.
Her voice was warm, a little husky, desperately alive.
“Oh, my dear people, my dear people, I am not going to preach tonight—we are all so weary of nagging sermons about being nice and good! I am not going to tell that you’re sinners, for which of us is not a sinner? I am not going to explain the Scriptures. We are all bored by tired old men explaining the Bible through their noses! No! We are going to find the golden Scriptures written in our own hearts, we are going to sing together, laugh together, rejoice together like a gathering of April brooks, rejoice that in us is living the veritable spirit of the Everlasting and Redeeming Christ Jesus!”
Elmer never knew what the words were, or the sense—if indeed anyone knew. It was all caressing music to him, and at the end, when she ran down curving flower-wreathed stairs to the lowest platform and held out her arms, pleading with them to find peace in salvation, he was aroused to go forward with the converts, to kneel in the writhing row under the blessing of her extended hands.
But he was lost in no mystical ecstasy. He was the critic, moved by the play but aware that he must get his copy in to the newspaper.
“This is the outfit I’ve been looking for! Here’s where I could go over great! I could beat that English preacher both ways from the ace. And Sharon—Oh, the darling!”
She was coming along the line of converts and near-converts, laying her shining hands on their heads. His shoulders quivered with consciousness of her nearness. When she reached him and invited him, in that thrilling voice, “Brother, won’t you find happiness in Jesus?” he did not bow lower, like the others, he did not sob, but looked straight up at her jauntily, seeking to hold her eyes, while he crowed, “It’s happiness just to have had your wondrous message, Sister Falconer!”
She glanced at him sharply, she turned blank, and instantly passed on.
He felt slapped. “I’ll show her yet!”
He stood aside as the crowd wavered out. He got into talk with the crisp young Englishman who had read the Scripture lesson—Cecil Aylston, Sharon’s first assistant.
“Mighty pleased to be here tonight, Brother,” bumbled Elmer. “I happen to be a Baptist preacher myself. Bountiful meeting! And you read the lesson most inspiringly.”
Cecil Aylston rapidly took in Elmer’s checked suit, his fancy vest, and “Oh. Really? Splendid. So good of you, I’m sure. If you will excuse me?” Nor did it increase Elmer’s affection to have Aylston leave him for one of the humblest of the adherents, an old woman in a broken and flapping straw hat.
Elmer disposed of Cecil Aylston: “To hell with him! There’s a fellow we’ll get rid of! A man like me, he gives me the icy mitt, and then he goes to the other extreme and slops all over some old dame that’s probably saved already, that you, by golly, couldn’t unsave with a carload of gin! That’ll do you, my young friend! And you don’t like my check suit, either. Well, I certainly do buy my clothes just to please you, all right!”
He waited, hoping for a chance at Sharon Falconer. And others were waiting. She waved her hand at all of them, waved her flaunting smile, rubbed her eyes, and begged, “Will you forgive me? I’m blind-tired. I must rest.” She vanished into the mysteries behind the gaudy gold-and-white pyramid.
Even in her staggering weariness, her voice was not drab; it was filled with that twilight passion which had captured Elmer more than her beauty. … “Never did see a lady just like her,” he reflected, as he plowed back to his hotel. “Face kinda thin. Usually I like ’em plumper. And yet—golly! I could fall for her as I never have for anybody in my life. … So this darn Englishman didn’t like my clothes! Looked as if he thought they were too sporty. Well, he can stick ’em in his ear! Anybody got any objection to my clothes?”
The slumbering universe did not answer, and he was almost content. And at eight next morning—Sautersville had an excellent clothing shop, conducted by Messrs. Erbsen and Goldfarb—and at eight Elmer was there, purchasing a chaste double-breasted brown suit and three rich but sober ties. By hounding Mr. Goldfarb he had the alterations done by half-past nine, and at ten he was grandly snooping about the revival tent. … He should have gone on to the next town this morning.
Sharon did not appear till eleven, to lecture the personal workers, but meanwhile Elmer had thrust himself into acquaintanceship with Art Nichols, a gaunt Yankee, once a barber, who played the cornet and the French horn in the three-piece orchestra which Sharon carried with her.
“Yes, pretty good game, this is,” droned Nichols. “Better’n barberin’ and better’n one-night stands—oh, I’m a real trouper, too; play characters in tent shows—I was out three seasons with Tom shows. This is easier. No street parades, and I guess prob’ly we do a lot of good, saving souls and so on. Only these religious folks do seem to scrap amongst themselves more’n the professionals.”
“Where do you go from here?”
“We close in five days, then we grab the collection and pull out of here and make a jump to Lincoln, Nebraska; open there in three days. Regular troupers’ jump, too—don’t even get a Pullman—leave here on the day coach at eleven p.m. and get into Lincoln at one.”
“Sunday night you leave, eh? That’s funny. I’ll be on that train. Going to Lincoln myself.”
“Well, you can come hear us there. I always do ‘Jerusalem the Golden’ on the cornet, first meeting. Knocks ’em cold. They say it’s all this gab that gets ’em going and drags in the sinners, but don’t you believe it—it’s the music. Say, I can get more damn sinners weeping on a E-flat cornet than nine gospel-artists all shooting off their faces at once!”
“I’ll bet you can, Art. Say, Art—Of course I’m a preacher myself, just in business temporarily, making arrangements for a new appointment.” Art looked like one who was about to not lend money. “But I don’t believe all this bull about never having a good time; and of course Paul said to ‘take a little wine for your stomach’s sake’ and this town is dry, but I’m going to a wet one between now and Saturday, and if I were to have a pint of rye in my jeans—heh?”
“Well, I’m awful fond of my stomach—like to do something for its sake!”
“What kind of a fellow is this Englishman? Seems to be Miss Falconer’s right-hand man.”
“Oh, he’s a pretty bright fellow, but he don’t seem to get along with us boys.”
“She like him? Wha’ does he call himself?”
“Cecil Aylston, his name is. Oh, Sharon liked him first-rate for a while, but wouldn’t wonder if she was tired of his highbrow stuff now, and the way he never gets chummy.”
“Well, I got to go speak to Miss Falconer a second. Glad met you, Art. See you on the train Sunday evening.”
They had been talking at one of the dozen entrances of the gospel tent. Elmer had been watching Sharon Falconer as she came briskly into the tent. She was no high priestess now in Grecian robe, but a businesswoman, in straw hat, gray suit, white shirtwaist, linen cuffs and collar. Only her blue bow and the jeweled cross on her watch-fob distinguished her from the women in offices. But Elmer, collecting every detail of her as a miner scoops up nuggets, knew now that she was not flat-breasted, as in the loose robe she might have been.
She spoke to the “personal workers,” the young women who volunteered to hold cottage prayer-meetings and to go from house to house stirring up spiritual prospects:
“My dear friends, I’m very glad you’re all praying, but there comes a time when you’ve got to add a little shoe-leather. While you’re longing for the Kingdom—the devil does his longing nights, and daytimes he hustles around seeing people, talking to ’em! Are you ashamed to go right in and ask folks to come to Christ—to come to our meetings, anyway? I’m not at all pleased. Not at all, my dear young friends. My charts show that in the Southeast district only one house in three has been visited. This won’t do! You’ve got to get over the idea that the service of the Lord is a nice game, like putting Easter lilies on the altar. Here there’s only five days left, and you haven’t yet waked up and got busy. And let’s not have any silly nonsense about hesitating to hit people for money-pledges, and hitting ’em hard! We can’t pay rent for this lot, and pay for lights and transportation and the wages of all this big crew I carry, on hot air! Now you—you pretty girl there with the red hair—my! I wish I had such hair!—what have you done, sure-enough done, this past week?”
In ten minutes she had them all crying, all aching to dash out and bring in souls and dollars.
She was leaving the tent when Elmer pounced on her, swaggering, his hand out.
“Sister Falconer, I want to congratulate you on your wonderful meetings. I’m a Baptist preacher—the Reverend Gantry.”
“Yes?” sharply. “Where is your church?”
“Why, uh, just at present I haven’t exactly got a church.”
She inspected his ruddiness, his glossiness, the odor of tobacco; her brilliant eyes had played all over him, and she demanded:
“What’s the trouble this time? Booze or women?”
“Why, that’s absolutely untrue! I’m surprised you should speak like that, Sister Falconer! I’m in perfectly good standing! It’s just—I’m taking a little time off to engage in business, in order to understand the working of the lay mind, before going on with my ministry.”
“Um. That’s splendid. Well, you have my blessing, Brother! Now if you will excuse me? I must go and meet the committee.”
She tossed him an unsmiling smile and raced away. He felt soggy, lumbering, unspeakably stupid, but he swore, “Damn you, I’ll catch you when you aren’t all wrapped up in business and your own darn-fool self-importance, and then I’ll make you wake up, my girl!”