Elmer Gantry (3 page)

For years the state of sin in which dwelt Elmer Gantry and Jim Lefferts had produced fascinated despair in the Christian
hearts of Terwillinger College. No revival but had flung its sulphur-soaked arrows at them—usually in their absence. No
prayer at the Y.M.C.A. meetings but had worried over their staggering folly.

Elmer had been known to wince when President the Rev. Dr. Willoughby Quarles was especially gifted with messages at
morning chapel, but Jim had held him firm in the faith of unfaith.

Now, Eddie Fislinger, like a prairie seraph, sped from room to room of the elect with the astounding news that Elmer had
publicly professed religion, and that he had endured thirty-nine minutes of private adjuration on the train. Instantly
started a holy plotting against the miserable sacrificial lamb, and all over Gritzmacher Springs, in the studies of
ministerial professors, in the rooms of students, in the small prayer-meeting room behind the chapel auditorium, joyous
souls conspired with the Lord against Elmer’s serene and zealous sinning. Everywhere, through the snowstorm, you could hear
murmurs of “There is more rejoicing over one sinner who repenteth—”

Even collegians not particularly esteemed for their piety, suspected of playing cards and secret smoking, were stirred to
ecstasy—or it may have been snickering. The football center, in unregenerate days a companion of Elmer and Jim but now
engaged to marry a large and sanctified Swedish co-ed from Chanute, rose voluntarily in Y.M.C.A. and promised God to help
him win Elmer’s favor.

The spirit waxed most fervent in the abode of Eddie Fislinger, who was now recognized as a future prophet, likely, some
day, to have under his inspiration one of the larger Baptist churches in Wichita or even Kansas City.

He organized an all-day and all-night prayer-meeting on Elmer’s behalf, and it was attended by the more ardent, even at
the risk of receiving cuts and uncivil remarks from instructors. On the bare floor of Eddie’s room, over Knute Halvorsted’s
paint-shop, from three to sixteen young men knelt at a time, and no 1800 revival saw more successful wrestling with the
harassed Satan. In fact one man, suspected of Holy Roller sympathies, managed to have the jerks, and while they felt that
this was carrying things farther than the Lord and the Baptist association would care to see it, added excitement to praying
at three o’clock in the morning, particularly as they were all of them extraordinarily drunk on coffee and eloquence.

By morning they felt sure that they had persuaded God to attend to Elmer, and though it is true that Elmer himself had
slept quite soundly all night, unaware of the prayer-meeting or of divine influences, it was but an example of the patience
of the heavenly powers. And immediately after those powers began to move.

To Elmer’s misery and Jim’s stilled fury, their sacred room was invaded by hordes of men with uncombed locks on their
foreheads, ecstasy in their eyes, and Bibles under their arms. Elmer was safe nowhere. No sooner had he disposed of one
disciple, by the use of spirited and blasphemous arguments patiently taught to him by Jim, than another would pop out from
behind a tree and fall on him.

At his boarding-house—Mother Metzger’s, over on Beech Street—a Y.M.C.A. dervish crowed as he passed the bread to Elmer,
“Jever study a kernel of wheat? Swonnerful! Think a wonnerful intricate thing like that created ITSELF? Somebody must have
created it. Who? God! Anybody that don’t recognize God in Nature—and acknowledge him in repentance—is DUMM. That’s what he
is!”

Instructors who had watched Elmer’s entrance to classrooms with nervous fury now smirked on him and with tenderness heard
the statement that he wasn’t quite prepared to recite. The president himself stopped Elmer on the street and called him My
Boy, and shook his hand with an affection which, Elmer anxiously assured himself, he certainly had done nothing to
merit.

He kept assuring Jim that he was in no danger, but Jim was alarmed, and Elmer himself more alarmed with each hour, each
new greeting of: “We need you with us, old boy—the world needs you!”

Jim did well to dread. Elmer had always been in danger of giving up his favorite diversions—not exactly giving them up,
perhaps, but of sweating in agony after enjoying them. But for Jim and his remarks about co-eds who prayed in public and
drew their hair back rebukingly from egg-like foreheads, one of these sirens of morality might have snared the easy-going
pangynistic Elmer by proximity.

A dreadful young woman from Mexico, Missouri, used to coax Jim to “tell his funny ideas about religion,” and go off in
neighs of pious laughter, while she choked, “Oh, you’re just too cute! You don’t mean a word you say. You simply want to
show off!” She had a deceptive sidelong look which actually promised nothing whatever this side of the altar, and she might,
but for Jim’s struggles, have led Elmer into an engagement.

The church and Sunday School at Elmer’s village, Paris, Kansas, a settlement of nine hundred evangelical Germans and
Vermonters, had nurtured in him a fear of religious machinery which he could never lose, which restrained him from such
reasonable acts as butchering Eddie Fislinger. That small pasty-white Baptist church had been the center of all his
emotions, aside from hell-raising, hunger, sleepiness, and love. And even these emotions were represented in the House of
the Lord, in the way of tacks in pew-cushions, Missionary suppers with chicken pie and angel’s-food cake, soporific sermons,
and the proximity of flexible little girls in thin muslin. But the arts and the sentiments and the sentimentalities—they
were for Elmer perpetually associated only with the church.

Except for circus bands, Fourth of July parades, and the singing of “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” and “Jingle Bells”
in school, all the music which the boy Elmer had ever heard was in church.

The church provided his only oratory, except for campaign speeches by politicians ardent about Jefferson and the price of
binding-twine; it provided all his painting and sculpture, except for the portraits of Lincoln, Longfellow, and Emerson in
the school-building, and the two china statuettes of pink ladies with gilt flower-baskets which stood on his mother’s
bureau. From the church came all his profounder philosophy, except the teachers’ admonitions that little boys who let
gartersnakes loose in school were certain to be licked now and hanged later, and his mother’s stream of opinions on hanging
up his overcoat, wiping his feet, eating fried potatoes with his fingers, and taking the name of the Lord in vain.

If he had sources of literary inspiration outside the church—in McGuffey’s Reader he encountered the boy who stood on the
burning deck, and he had a very pretty knowledge of the Nick Carter Series and the exploits of Cole Younger and the James
Boys—yet here too the church had guided him. In Bible stories, in the words of the great hymns, in the anecdotes which the
various preachers quoted, he had his only knowledge of literature—

The story of Little Lame Tom who shamed the wicked rich man that owned the handsome team of grays and the pot hat and led
him to Jesus. The ship’s captain who in the storm took counsel with the orphaned but righteous child of missionaries in
Zomballa. The Faithful Dog who saved his master during a terrific conflagration (only sometimes it was a snowstorm, or an
attack by Indians) and roused him to give up horse-racing, rum, and playing the harmonica.

How familiar they were, how thrilling, how explanatory to Elmer of the purposes of life, how preparatory for his future
usefulness and charm.

The church, the Sunday School, the evangelistic orgy, choir-practise, raising the mortgage, the delights of funerals, the
snickers in back pews or in the other room at weddings—they were as natural, as inescapable a mold of manners to Elmer as
Catholic processionals to a street gamin in Naples.

The Baptist Church of Paris, Kansas! A thousand blurred but indestructible pictures.

Hymns! Elmer’s voice was made for hymns. He rolled them out like a negro. The organ-thunder of “Nicæa”:

The splendid rumble of the Doxology. “Throw Out the Lifeline,” with its picture of a wreck pounded in the darkness by
surf which the prairie child imagined as a hundred feet high. “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” to which you could without
rebuke stamp your feet.

Sunday School picnics! Lemonade and four-legged races and the ride on the hay-rack singing “Seeing Nelly Home.”

Sunday School text cards! True, they were chiefly a medium of gambling, but as Elmer usually won the game (he was the
first boy in Paris to own a genuine pair of loaded dice) he had plenty of them in his gallery, and they gave him a taste for
gaudy robes, for marble columns and the purple-broidered palaces of kings, which was later to be of value in quickly
habituating himself to the more decorative homes of vice. The three kings bearing caskets of ruby and sardonyx. King
Zedekiah in gold and scarlet, kneeling on a carpet of sapphire-blue, while his men-at-arms came fleeing and blood-stained,
red blood on glancing steel, with tidings of the bannered host of Nebuchadnezzar, great king of Babylon. And all his life
Elmer remembered, in moments of ardor, during oratorios in huge churches, during sunset at sea, a black-bearded David
standing against raw red cliffs—a figure heroic and summoning to ambition, to power, to domination.

Sunday School Christmas Eve! The exhilaration of staying up, and publicly, till nine-thirty. The tree, incredibly tall,
also incredibly inflammable, flashing with silver cords, with silver stars, with cotton-batting snow. The two round stoves
red-hot. Lights and lights and lights. Pails of candy, and for every child in the school a present—usually a book, very
pleasant, with colored pictures of lambs and volcanoes. The Santa Claus—he couldn’t possibly be Lorenzo Nickerson, the
house-painter, so bearded was he, and red-cheeked, and so witty in his comment on each child as it marched up for its
present. The enchantment, sheer magic, of the Ladies’ Quartette singing of shepherds who watched their flocks by nights . .
. brown secret hilltops under one vast star.

And the devastating morning when the preacher himself, the Rev. Wilson Hinckley Skaggs, caught Elmer matching for Sunday
School contribution pennies on the front steps, and led him up the aisle for all to giggle at, with a sharp and not very
clean ministerial thumb-nail gouging his ear-lobe.

And the other passing preachers; Brother Organdy, who got you to saw his wood free; Brother Blunt, who sneaked behind
barns to catch you on Halloween; Brother Ingle, who was zealous but young and actually human, and who made whistles from
willow branches for you.

And the morning when Elmer concealed an alarm clock behind the organ and it went off, magnificently, just as the
superintendent (Dr. Prouty, the dentist) was whimpering, “Now let us all be par-TIC-ularly quiet as Sister Holbrick leads us
in prayer.”

And always the three chairs that stood behind the pulpit, the intimidating stiff chairs of yellow plush and carved oak
borders, which, he was uneasily sure, were waiting for the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and
kindness and reason.

Even had Elmer not known the church by habit, he would have been led to it by his mother. Aside from his friendship for
Jim Lefferts, Elmer’s only authentic affection was for his mother, and she was owned by the church.

She was a small woman, energetic, nagging but kindly, once given to passionate caresses and now to passionate prayer, and
she had unusual courage. Early left a widow by Logan Gantry, dealer in feed, flour, lumber, and agricultural implements, a
large and agreeable man given to debts and whisky, she had supported herself and Elmer by sewing, trimming hats, baking
bread, and selling milk. She had her own millinery and dressmaking shop now, narrow and dim but proudly set right on Main
Street, and she was able to give Elmer the three hundred dollars a year which, with his summer earnings in harvest field and
lumber-yard, was enough to support him—in Terwillinger, in 1902.

She had always wanted Elmer to be a preacher. She was jolly enough, and no fool about pennies in making change, but for a
preacher standing up on a platform in a long-tailed coat she had gaping awe.

Elmer had since the age of sixteen been a member in good standing of the Baptist Church—he had been most satisfactorily
immersed in the Kayooska River. Large though Elmer was, the evangelist had been a powerful man and had not only ducked him
but, in sacred enthusiasm, held him under, so that he came up sputtering, in a state of grace and muddiness. He had also
been saved several times, and once, when he had pneumonia, he had been esteemed by the pastor and all visiting ladies as
rapidly growing in grace.

But he had resisted his mother’s desire that he become a preacher. He would have to give up his entertaining vices, and
with wide-eyed and panting happiness he was discovering more of them every year. Equally he felt lumbering and shamed
whenever he tried to stand up before his tittering gang in Paris and appear pious.

It was hard even in college days to withstand his mother. Though she came only to his shoulder, such was her bustling
vigor, her swift shrewdness of tongue, such the gallantry of her long care for him, that he was afraid of her as he was
afraid of Jim Leffert’s scorn. He never dared honestly to confess his infidelity, but he grumbled, “Oh, gee, Ma, I don’t
know. Trouble is, fellow don’t make much money preaching. Gee, there’s no hurry. Don’t have to decide yet.”

And she knew now that he was likely to become a lawyer. Well, that wasn’t so bad, she felt; some day he might go to
Congress and reform the whole nation into a pleasing likeness of Kansas. But if he could only have become part of the
mysteries that hovered about the communion table—

She had talked him over with Eddie Fislinger. Eddie came from a town twelve miles from Paris. Though it might be years
before he was finally ordained as a minister, Eddie had by his home congregation been given a License to Preach as early as
his Sophomore year in Terwillinger, and for a month, one summer (while Elmer was out in the harvest fields or the swimming
hole or robbing orchards), Eddie had earnestly supplied the Baptist pulpit in Paris.

Mrs. Gantry consulted him, and Eddie instructed her with the divinity of nineteen.

Oh, yes, Brother Elmer was a fine young man—so strong—they all admired him—a little too much tempted by the vain gauds of
This World, but that was because he was young. Oh, yes, some day Elmer would settle down and be a fine Christian husband and
father and business man. But as to the ministry—no. Mrs. Gantry must not too greatly meddle with these mysteries. It was up
to God. A fellow had to have a Call before he felt his vocation for the ministry; a real overwhelming mysterious knock-down
Call, such as Eddie himself had ecstatically experienced, one evening in a cabbage patch. No, not think of that. Their task
now was to get Elmer into a real state of grace and that, Eddie assured her, looked to him like a good deal of a job.

Undoubtedly, Eddie explained, when Elmer had been baptized, at sixteen, he had felt conviction, he had felt the
invitation, and the burden of his sins had been lifted. But he had not, Eddie doubted, entirely experienced salvation. He
was not really in a state of grace. He might almost be called unconverted.

Eddie diagnosed the case completely, with all the proper pathological terms. Whatever difficulties he may have had with
philosophy, Latin, and calculus, there had never been a time since the age of twelve when Eddie Fislinger had had difficulty
in understanding what the Lord God Almighty wanted, and why, all through history, he had acted thus or thus.

“I should be the last to condemn athaletics,” said Eddie. “We must have strong bodies to endure the burden and the sweat
of carrying the Gospel to the world. But at the same time, it seems to me that football tends to detract from religion. I’m
a little afraid that just at PRESENT Elmer is not in a state of grace. But, oh, Sister, don’t let us worry and travail! Let
us trust the Lord. I’ll go to Elmer myself, and see what I can do.”

That must have been the time—it certainly was during that vacation between their Sophomore and Junior years—when Eddie
walked out to the farm where Elmer was working, and looked at Elmer, bulky and hayseedy in a sleeveless undershirt, and
spoke reasonably of the weather, and walked back again. . . .

Whenever Elmer was at home, though he tried affectionately to live out his mother’s plan of life for him, though without
very much grumbling he went to bed at nine-thirty, whitewashed the hen-house, and accompanied her to church, yet Mrs. Gantry
suspected that sometimes he drank beer and doubted about Jonah, and uneasily Elmer heard her sobbing as she knelt by her
high-swelling, white-counterpaned, old-fashioned bed.