Elmer Gantry (11 page)

Elmer and Frank had gone down on Saturday afternoon to decorate the church for the Thanksgiving service. To save the trip
to Babylon and back, they were to spend Saturday night in the broad farmhouse of Deacon Bains, and Lulu Bains and her
spinster cousin, Miss Baldwin, were assisting in the decoration—in other words doing it. They were stringing pine boughs
across the back of the hall, and arranging a harvest feast of pumpkins, yellow corn, and velvety sumach in front of the
pulpit.

“I want your advice, Lulu—Sister Lulu. Don’t you think in my sermon tomorrow it might be helpful to explain—”

(They stood side by side. How sweet were her little shoulders, her soft pussy-cat cheeks! He had to kiss them! He had to!
He swayed toward her. Damn Frank and that Baldwin female! Why didn’t they get out?)

“—to explain that all these riches of the harvest, priceless though they are in themselves and necessary for grub—for the
festal board, yet they are but symbols and indications of the—Do sit down, Lulu; you look a little tired.—of the deeper
spiritual blessings which he also showers on us and not just at harvest time, and this is a very important point—”

(Her hand dropped against his knee; lay, so white, on the drab pew. Her breasts were young and undrained under her plaid
blouse. He had to touch her hand. His fingers crept toward it, touched it by accident, surely by accident, while she looked
devotion and he intoned sublimity.)

“—a very important point indeed; all the year round we receive those greater inner blessings, and it is for them more
than for any material, uh, material gains that we should lift our voices in Thanksgiving. Don’t you think it might be
valuable to all of us if I brought that out?”

“Oh, yes! Indeed I do! I think that’s a lovely thought!”

(His arms tingled. He HAD to slip them about her.)

Frank and Miss Baldwin had sat down, and they were in an intolerably long discussion as to what ought to be done about
that terrible little Cutler boy who said that he didn’t believe that the ravens brought any bread and meat to Elijah, not if
he knew anything about these ole crows! Frank explained that he did not wish to rebuke honest doubt; but when this boy went
and made a regular business of cutting up and asking foolish questions—

“Lulu!” Elmer urged. “Skip back in the other room with me a second. There’s something about the church work I want to ask
you, and I don’t want them to hear.”

There were two rooms in the Schoenheim church: the auditorium and a large closet for the storage of hymn-books, mops,
brooms, folding chairs, communion cups. It was lighted by a dusty window.

“Sister Bains and I are going to look over the Sunday School lesson-charts,” Elmer called largely and brightly.

The fact that she did not deny it bound them together in secrecy. He sat on an upturned bucket; she perched on a
step-ladder. It was pleasant to be small in her presence and look up to her.

What the “something about church work” which he was going to ask her was, he had no notion, but Elmer was a very ready
talker in the presence of young women. He launched out:

“I need your advice. I’ve never met anybody that combined common sense and spiritual values like what you do.”

“Oh, my, you’re just flattering me, Brother Gantry!”

“No, I’m not. Honest, I ain’t! You don’t appreciate yourself. That’s because you’ve always lived in this little burg, but
if you were in Chicago or some place like that, believe me, they’d appreciate your, uh, that wonderful sense of spiritual
values and everything.”

“Oh—Chicago! My! I’d be scared to death!”

“Well, I’ll have to take you there some day and show you the town! Guess folks would talk about their bad old preacher
THEN!”

They both laughed heartily.

“But seriously, Lulu, what I want to know is—uh—Oh! What I wanted to ask you: Do you think I ought to come down here and
hold Wednesday prayer-meetings?”

“Why, I think that’d be awfully nice.”

“But you see, I’d have to come down on that ole hand-car.”

“That’s so.”

“And you can’t know how hard I got to study every evening at the Seminary.”

“Oh, yes, I can imagine!”

They both sighed in sympathy, and he laid his hand on hers, and they sighed again, and he removed his hand almost
prudishly.

“But of course I wouldn’t want to spare myself in any way. It’s a pastor’s privilege to spend himself for his
congregation.”

“Yes, that’s so.”

“But on the other hand, with the roads the way they are here, especially in winter and all, and most of the congregation
living way out on farms and all—hard for ’em to get in, eh?”

“That’s so. The roads do get bad. Yes, I think you’re right, Brother Gantry.”

“Oh! Lulu! And here I’ve been calling you by your first name! You’re going to make me feel I been acting terrible if you
rebuke me that way and don’t call me Elmer!”

“But then you’re the preacher, and I’m just nobody.”

“Oh, yes, you are!”

“Oh, no, I’m not!”

They laughed very much.

“Listen, Lulu, honey. Remember I’m really still a kid—just twenty-five this month—only ‘bout five or six years older’n
you are. Now try calling me Elmer, and see how it sounds.”

“Oh, my! I wouldn’t dare!”

“Well, try it!”

“Oh, I couldn’t! Imagine!”

“‘Fraid cat!”

“I am not so.”

“Yes, you are!”

“No, I’m not!”

“I dare you!”

“Well—Elmer then! So there now!”

They laughed intimately, and in the stress of their merriment he picked up her hand squeezed it, rubbed it against his
arm. He did not release it, but it was only with the friendliest and least emphatic pressure that he held it while he
crooned:

“You aren’t really scared of poor old Elmer?”

“Yes, I am, a tiny bit!”

“But why?”

“Oh, you’re big and strong and dignified, like you were lots older, and you have such a boom-boom voice—my, I love to
listen to it, but it scares me—I feel like you’d turn on me and say, ‘You bad little girl,’ and then I’d have to ‘fess. My!
And then you’re so terribly educated—you know such long words, and you can explain all these things about the Bible that I
never can understand. And of course you are a real ordained Baptist clergyman.”

“Um, uh—But does that keep me from being a man, too?”

“Yes, it does! Sort of!”

Then there was no playfulness, but a grim urgency in his voice:

“Then you couldn’t imagine me kissing you? . . . Look at me! . . . Look at me, I tell you! . . . There! . . . No, don’t
look away now. Why, you’re blushing! You dear, poor, darling kid! You CAN imagine me kissing—”

“Well, I oughtn’t to!”

“‘Shamed?”

“Yes, I am!”

“Listen, dear. You think of me as so awfully grown-up, and of course I have to impress all these folks when I’m in the
pulpit, but you can see through it and—I’m really just a big bashful kid, and I need your help so. Do you know, dear, you
remind me of my mother—”

Frank Shallard turned on Elmer in their bedroom, while they were washing for supper—their first moment alone since Lulu
and Miss Baldwin had driven them to the Bains farm to spend the night before the Thanksgiving service.

“Look here, Gantry—Elmer. I don’t think it looked well, the way you took Miss Bains in the back room at the church and
kept her there—must have been half an hour—and when I came in you two jumped and looked guilty.”

“Uh-huh, so our little friend Franky is a real rubber-necking old woman!”

It was a spacious dusky cavern under the eaves, the room where they were to stay the night. The pitcher on the black
walnut washstand was stippled in gold, riotous with nameless buds. Elmer stood glaring, his big forearms bare and dripping,
shaking his fingers over the carpet before he reached for the towel.

“I am not a ‘rubber-neck,’ and you know it, Gantry. But you’re the preacher here, and it’s our duty, for the effect on
others, to avoid even the appearance of evil.”

“Evil to him that evil thinks. Maybe you’ve heard that, too!”

“Oh, yes, Elmer, I think perhaps I have!”

“Suspicious, dirty-minded Puritan, that’s what you are, seeing evil where there ain’t any meant.”

“People don’t hate Puritans because they suspect unjustly, but because they suspect only too darned justly. Look here
now, Elmer. I don’t want to be disagreeable—”

“Well, you are!”

“—but Miss Bains—she looks sort of cuddlesome and flirtatious, but I’m dead certain she’s straight as can be, and I’m not
going to stand back and watch you try to, uh, to make love to her.”

“Well, smarty, suppose I wanted to marry her?”

“Do you?”

“You know so blame’ much, you ought to know without asking!”

“Do you?”

“I haven’t said I didn’t.”

“Your rhetoric is too complicated for me. I’ll take it that you do mean to. That’s fine! I’ll announce your intentions to
Deacon Bains.”

“You will like hell! Now you look here, Shallard! I’m not going to have you poking your long nose into my business, and
that’s all there is to it, see?”

“Yes, it would be if you were a layman and I had no official connection with this outfit. I don’t believe too much in
going around being moral for other people. But you’re the preacher here— you’re an ordained minister—and I’m responsible
with you for the welfare of this church, and I’m damned if I’m going to watch you seducing the first girl you get your big
sweaty hands on—Oh, don’t go doubling up your fists. Of course you could lick me. But you won’t. Especially here in the
deacon’s house. Ruin you in the ministry. . . . Great God, and you’re the kind we affably let into the Baptist ministry! I
was saying: I don’t propose to see you trying to seduce—”

“Now, by God, if you think I’m going to stand—Let me tell you right now, you’ve got the filthiest mind I ever heard of,
Shallard! Why you should think I intend for one single second to be anything but friendly and open and aboveboard with
Lulu—with Miss Bains— Why, you fool, I was in there listening about how she was in love with a fellow and he’s gone off to
Chicago and chucked her, and that was all, and why you should think—”

“Oh, don’t be so fat-headed, Gantry! You can’t get away with sitting in my room at the Sem boasting, you and Zenz
boasting about how many affairs you’ve had—”

“Well, it’s the last time I’ll sit in your damned room!”

“Splendid!”

“Think what you want to. And go to the devil! And be sure and run tattling to Pop Trosper and the rest of the
faculty!”

“Well, that’s a good come-back, Gantry. I may do just that. But this evening I’ll just watch Lulu—watch Miss Bains for
you. Poor sweet kid that she is! Nice eyes!”

“Uh-huh, young Shallard, so you’ve been smelling around, too!”

“My God, Gantry, what a perfect specimen you are!”

Deacon and Mrs. Bains—an angry-faced, generous, grasping, horsy, black-mustached man he was, and she a dumpling—managed
to treat Frank and Elmer simultaneously as professors of the sacred mysteries and as two hungry boys who were starved at
Mizpah and who were going to catch up tonight. Fried chicken, creamed chipped beef, homemade sausages, pickles and mince pie
in which Elmer suspected, and gratefully suspected, the presence of unrighteous brandy, were only part of the stout
trencher-work required of the young prophets. Mr. Bains roared every three minutes at the swollen and suffering Frank,
“Nonsense, nonsense, Brother, you haven’t begun to eat yet! What’s the matter with you? Pass up your plate for another
helpin’.”

Miss Baldwin, the spinster, two other deacons and their wives and a young man from a near-by farm, one Floyd Naylor, were
present, and the clergy were also expected to be instructive. The theories were that they cared to talk of nothing save
theology and the church and, second, that such talk was somehow beneficial in the tricky business of enjoying your sleep and
buggy-riding and vittles, and still getting into heaven.

“Say, Brother Gantry,” said Mr. Bains, “what Baptist paper do you like best for home reading? I tried the Watchman
Examiner for a while, but don’t seem to me it lambastes the Campbellites like it ought to, or gives the Catholics what-for,
like a real earnest Christian sheet ought to. I’ve started taking the Word and Way. Now there’s a mighty sound paper that
don’t mince matters none, and written real elegant—just suits me. It tells you straight out from the shoulder that if you
don’t believe in the virgin birth and the resurrection, atonement, and immersion, then it don’t make no difference about
your so-called good works and charity and all that, because you’re doomed and bound to go straight to hell, and not no
make-believe hell, either, but a real gosh-awful turble bed of sure-enough coals! Yes, sir!”

“Oh, look here now, Brother Bains!” Frank Shallard protested. “You don’t mean to say you think that the Lord Jesus isn’t
going to save one single solitary person who isn’t an orthodox Baptist?”

“Well, I don’t perfess to know all these things myself, like I was a high-toned preacher. But way I see it: Oh, yes,
maybe if a fellow ain’t ever had a chance to see the light—say he was brought up a Methodist or a Mormon, and never HEARD a
real dyed-inthe-wool Baptist explain the complete truth, then maybe God might forgive him ‘cause he was ignorant. But one
thing I do know, absolute: All these ‘advanced thinkers’ and ‘higher critics’ are going to the hottest pit of hell! What do
you think about it, Brother Gantry?”

“Personally, I’m much inclined to agree with you,” Elmer gloated. “But, anyway, we can safely leave it to the mercy of
God to take care of wobblers and cowards and gas-bags like these alleged advanced thinkers. When they treacherously weaken
our efforts at soul-saving out here in the field, and go in for a lot of cussing and discussing and fussing around with a
lot of fool speculation that don’t do anybody any practical good in the great work of bringing poor sufferin’ souls to
peace, why then I’m too busy to waste MY time on ’em, that’s all, and I wouldn’t care one bit if they heard me and knew it!
Fact, that’s the only trouble with Brother Shallard here—I know he has the grace of God in his heart, but he will waste time
worrying over a lot of doctrines when everything’s set down in Baptist tradition, and that’s all you need to know. I want
you to think about that, Frank—”

Elmer had recovered. He enjoyed defying lightning, provided it was lightning no more dynamic than Frank was likely to
furnish. He looked at Frank squarely. . . . It was perhaps half an hour since their talk in the bedroom.

Frank opened his mouth twice, and closed it. Then it was too late. Deacon Bains was already overwhelming him with
regeneration and mince pie.