Elmer Gantry (32 page)

If in Banjo Crossing Elmer had been bored by inactivity, in Zenith he was almost exhausted by the demands.

Wellspring Church had been carrying on a score of institutional affairs, and Elmer doubled them, for nothing brought in
more sympathy, publicity, and contributions. Rich old hyenas who never went to church would ooze out a hundred dollars or
even five hundred when you described the shawled mothers coming tearfully to the milk station.

There were classes in manual training, in domestic science, in gymnastics, in bird study, for the poor boys and girls of
Old Town. There were troops of Boy Scouts, of Camp Fire Girls. There were Ladies’ Aid meetings, Women’s Missionary Society
meetings, regular church suppers before prayer-meeting, a Bible Training School for Sunday School teachers, a sewing
society, nursing and free food for the sick and poor, half a dozen clubs of young men and women, half a dozen circles of
matrons, and a Men’s Club with monthly dinners, for which the pastor had to snare prominent speakers without payment. The
Sunday School was like a small university. And every day there were dozens of callers who asked the pastor for comfort, for
advice, for money—young men in temptation, widows wanting jobs, old widows wanting assurance of immortality, hoboes wanting
hand-outs, and eloquent book-agents. Where in Banjo the villagers had been shy to expose their cancerous sorrows, in the
city there were always lonely people who reveled in being a little twisted, a little curious, a little shameful; who yearned
to talk about themselves and who expected the pastor to be forever interested.

Elmer scarce had time to prepare his sermons, though he really did yearn now to make them original and eloquent. He was
no longer satisfied to depend on his barrel. He wanted to increase his vocabulary; he was even willing to have new ideas,
lifted out of biology and biography and political editorials.

He was out of the house daily at eight in the morning—usually after a breakfast in which he desired to know of Cleo why
the deuce she couldn’t keep Nat and Bunny quiet while he read the paper—and he did not return till six, burning with
weariness. He had to study in the evening. . . . He was always testy. . . . His children were afraid of him, even when he
boisterously decided to enact the Kind Parent for one evening and to ride them pickaback, whether or no they wanted to be
ridden pickaback. They feared God properly and kept his commandments, did Nat and Bunny, because their father so admirably
prefigured God.

When Cleo was busy with meetings and clubs at the church, Elmer blamed her for neglecting the house; when she slackened
her church work, he was able equally to blame her for not helping him professionally. And obviously it was because she had
so badly arranged the home routine that he never had time for morning Family Worship. . . . But he made up for it by the
violence of his Grace before Meat, during which he glared at the children if they stirred in their chairs.

And always the telephone was ringing—not only in his office but at home in the evening.

What should Miss Weezeger, the deaconess, do about this old Miss Mally, who wanted a new nightgown? Could the Reverend
Gantry give a short talk on “Advertising and the Church” to the Ad Club next Tuesday noon? Could he address the Letitia
Music and Literary Club on “Religion and Poetry” next Thursday at four—just when he had a meeting with the Official Board.
The church janitor wanted to start the furnace, but the coal hadn’t been delivered. What advice would the Reverend Mr.
Gantry give to a young man who wanted to go to college and had no money? From what book was that quotation about “Cato
learned Greek at eighty Sophocles” which he had used in last Sunday’s sermon? Would Mr. Gantry be so kind and address the
Lincoln School next Friday morning at nine-fifteen—the dear children would be so glad of any Message he had to give them,
and the regular speaker couldn’t show up. Would it be all right for the Girls’ Basket Ball team to use the basement tonight?
Could the Reverend come out, right now, to the house of Ben T. Evers, 2616 Appleby Street—five miles away—because
grandmother was very ill and needed consolation. What the dickens did the Reverend mean by saying, last Sunday, that
hell-fire might be merely spiritual and figurative—didn’t he know that that was agin Matthew V: 29: “Thy whole body should
be cast into hell.” Could he get the proof of the church bulletin back to the printers right away? Could the officers of the
Southwest Circle of Women meet in Mr. Gantry’s study tomorrow? Would Reverend Gantry speak at the Old Town Improvement
Association Banquet? Did the Reverend want to buy a secondhand motor car in A-1 shape? Could the Reverend—

“God!” said the Reverend; and, “Huh? Why, no, of course you couldn’t answer ’em for me, Cleo. But at least you might try
to keep from humming when I’m simply killing myself trying to take care of all these blame’ fools and sacrificing myself and
everything!”

And the letters.

In response to every sermon he had messages informing him that he was the bright hope of evangelicism and that he was a
cloven-hoofed fiend; that he was a rousing orator and a human saxophone. One sermon on the delights of Heaven, which he
pictured as a perpetual summer afternoon at a lake resort, brought in the same mail four comments:

i have got an idea for you verry important since hearing yrs of last Sunday evening why do’nt you hold services every
evning to tell people & etc about heven and danger of hell we must hurry hurry hurry, the church in a bad way and is up
to us who have many and infaliable proofs of heven and hell to hasten yes we must rescew the parishing, make everywhere the
call of the lord, fill the churches and empty these damable theatre.

Yrs for his coming, James C. Wickes, 2113 A, McGrew Street.

The writer is an honest and unwavering Christian and I want to tell you, Gantry, that the only decent and helpful and
enjoyable thing about your sermon last Sunday A.M. was your finally saying “Let us pray,” only YOU should have said “Let me
prey.” By your wibbly-wabbly emphasis on Heaven and your fear to emphasize the horrors of Hell, you get people into an
easy-going, self-satisfied frame of mind where they slip easily into sin, and while pretending to be an earnest and literal
believer in every word of the Scriptures, you are an atheist in sheep’s clothing. I am a minister of the gospel and know
whereof I speak.

Yours, ALMON JEWINGS STRAFE.

I heard your rotten old-fashioned sermon last Sunday. You pretend to be liberal, but you are just a hide-bound
conservative. Nobody believes in a material heaven or hell any more, and you make yourself ridiculous by talking about them.
Wake up and study some modern dope.

A student.

Dear Brother, your lovely sermon last Sunday about Heaven was the finest I have ever heard. I am quite an old lady and
not awful well and in my ills and griefs, especially about my grandson who drinks, your wonderful words give me such a
comfort I cannot describe to you.

Yours admiringly, MRS. R. R. GOMMERIE.

And he was expected, save with the virulent anonymous letters, to answer all of them . . . in his stuffy office, facing a
shelf of black-bound books, dictating to the plaintive Miss Bundle, who never caught an address, who always single-spaced
the letters which should have been double-spaced, and who had a speed which seemed adequate until you discovered that she
attained it by leaving out most of the verbs and adjectives.

Whether or not he was irritable on week days, Sundays were to his nervous family a hell of keeping out of his way, and
for himself they had the strain of a theatrical first night.

He was up at seven, looking over his sermon notes, preparing his talk to the Sunday School, and snarling at Cleo, “Good
Lord, you might have breakfast on time today, at least, and why in heaven’s name you can’t get that furnace-man here so I
won’t have to freeze while I’m doing my studying—”

He was at Sunday School at a quarter to ten, and often he had to take the huge Men’s Bible Class and instruct it in the
more occult meanings of the Bible, out of his knowledge of the original Hebrew and Greek as denied to the laity.

Morning church services began at eleven. Now that he often had as many as a thousand in the audience, as he peeped out at
them from the study he had stage-fright. Could he hold them? What the deuce had he intended to say about communion? He
couldn’t remember a word of it.

It was not easy to keep on urging the unsaved to come forward as though he really thought they would and as though he
cared a hang whether they did or not. It was not easy, on communion Sundays, when they knelt round the altar rail, to keep
from laughing at the sanctimonious eyes and prim mouths of brethren whom he knew to be crooks in private business.

It was not easy to go on saying with proper conviction that whosoever looked on a woman to lust after her would go
booming down to hell when there was a pretty and admiring girl in the front row. And it was hardest of all, when he had done
his public job, when he was tired and wanted to let down, to stand about after the sermon and be hand-shaken by aged
spinster saints who expected him to listen without grinning while they quavered that he was a silver-plated angel and that
they were just like him.

To have to think up a new, bright, pious quip for each of them! To see large sporting males regarding him the while as
though he were an old woman in trousers!

By the time he came home for Sunday lunch he was looking for a chance to feel injured and unappreciated and pestered and
put upon, and usually he found the chance.

There were still ahead of him, for the rest of the day, the Sunday evening service, often the Epworth League, sometimes
special meetings at four. Whenever the children disturbed his Sunday afternoon nap, Elmer gave an impersonation of the
prophets. Why! All he asked of Nat and Bunny was that, as a Methodist minister’s children, they should not be seen on the
streets or in the parks on the blessed Sabbath afternoon, and that they should not be heard about the house. He told them,
often, that they were committing an unexampled sin by causing him to fall into bad tempers unbecoming a Man of God.

But through all these labors and this lack of domestic sympathy he struggled successfully.

Elmer was as friendly as ever with Bishop Toomis.

He had conferred early with the bishop and with the canny lawyer-trustee, T. J. Rigg, as to what fellow-clergymen in
Zenith it would be worth his while to know.

Among the ministers outside the Methodist Church, they recommended Dr. G. Prosper Edwards, the highly cultured pastor of
the Pilgrim Congregational Church, Dr. John Jennison Drew, the active but sanctified leader of the Chatham Road Presbyterian
Church, that solid Baptist, the Reverend Hosea Jessup, and Willis Fortune Tate, who, though he was an Episcopalian and very
shaky as regards liquor and hell, had one of the suavest and most expensive flocks in town. And if one could endure the
Christian Scientists’ smirking conviction that they alone had the truth, there was the celebrated leader of the First
Christian Science Church, Mr. Irving Tillish.

The Methodist ministers of Zenith Elmer met and studied at their regular Monday morning meetings, in the funeral and
wedding chapel of Central Church. They looked like a group of prosperous and active business men. Only two of them ever wore
clerical waistcoats, and of these only one compromised with the Papacy and the errors of Canterbury by turning his collar
around. A few resembled farmers, a few stone-masons, but most of them looked like retail shops. The Reverend Mr. Chatterton
Weeks indulged in claret-colored “fancy socks,” silk handkerchiefs, and an enormous emerald ring, and gave a pleasant
suggestion of vaudeville. Nor were they too sanctimonious. They slapped one another’s backs, they used first names, they
shouted, “I hear you’re grabbing off all the crowds in town, you old cuss!” and for the manlier and more successful of them
it was quite the thing to use now and then a daring “damn.”

It would, to an innocent layman, have been startling to see them sitting in rows like schoolboys; to hear them listening
not to addresses on credit and the routing of hardware but to short helpful talks on Faith. The balance was kept, however,
by an adequate number of papers on trade subjects—the sort of pews most soothing to the back; the value of sending postcards
reading “Where were you last Sunday, old scout? We sure did miss you at the Men’s Bible Class”; the comparative values of a
giant imitation thermometer, a giant clock, and a giant automobile speedometer, as a register of the money coming in during
special drives; the question of gold and silver stars as rewards for Sunday School attendance; the effectiveness of giving
the children savings-banks in the likeness of a jolly little church to encourage them to save their pennies for Christian
work; and the morality of violin solos.

Nor were the assembled clergy too inhumanly unboastful in their reports of increased attendance and collections.

Elmer saw that the Zenith district superintendent, one Fred Orr, could be neglected as a creeping and silent fellow who
was all right at prayer and who seemed to lead an almost irritatingly pure life, but who had no useful notions about
increasing collections.

The Methodist preachers whom he had to take seriously as rivals were four.

There was Chester Brown, the ritualist, of the new and ultra-Gothic Asbury Church. He was almost as bad, they said, as an
Episcopalian. He wore a clerical waistcoat buttoned up to his collar; he had a robed choir and the processional; he was
rumored once to have had candles on what was practically an altar. He was, to Elmer, distressingly literary and dramatic. It
was said that he had literary gifts; his articles appeared not only in the Advocate but in the Christian Century and the New
Republic—rather whimsical essays, safely Christian but frank about the church’s sloth and wealth and blindness. He had been
Professor of English Literature and Church History in Luccock College, and he did such sermons on books as Elmer, with his
exhausting knowledge of Longfellow and George Eliot, could never touch.

Dr. Otto Hickenlooper of Central Church was an even more distressing rival. His was the most active institutional church
of the whole state. He had not only manual training and gymnastics but sacred pageants, classes in painting (never from the
nude), classes in French and batik-making and sex hygiene and bookkeeping and short-story writing. He had clubs for railroad
men, for stenographers, for bell-boys; and after the church suppers the young people were encouraged to sit about in booths
to which the newspapers referred flippantly as “courting corners.”

Dr. Hickenlooper had come out hard for Social Service. He was in sympathy with the American Federation of Labor, the I.
W. W., the Socialists, the Communists, and the Non-partisan League, which was more than they were with one another. He held
Sunday evening lectures on the Folly of War, the Minimum Wage, the need of clean milk; and once a month he had an open
forum, to which were invited the most dangerous radical speakers, who were allowed to say absolutely anything they liked,
provided they did not curse, refer to adultery, or criticize the leadership of Christ.

Dr. Mahlon Potts, of the First Methodist Church, seemed to Elmer at first glance less difficult to oust. He was fat,
pompous, full of heavy rumbles of piety. He was a stage parson. “Ah, my dear Brother!” he boomed; and “How are we this
morning, my dear Doctor, and how is the lovely little wife?” But Dr. Potts had the largest congregation of any church of any
denomination in Zenith. He was so respectable. He was so safe. People knew where they were, with him. He was adequately
flowery of speech—he could do up a mountain, a sunset, a burning of the martyrs, a reception of the same by the saints in
heaven, as well as any preacher in town. But he never doubted nor let any one else doubt that by attending the Methodist
Church regularly, and observing the rules of repentance, salvation, baptism, communion, and liberal giving, every one would
have a minimum of cancer and tuberculosis and sin, and unquestionably arrive in heaven.

These three Elmer envied but respected; one man he envied and loathed.

That was Philip McGarry of the Arbor Methodist Church.

Philip McGarry, Ph. D. of Chicago University in economics and philosophy—only everybody who liked him, layman or
fellow-parson, seemed to call him “Phil”—was at the age of thirty-five known through the whole American Methodist Church as
an enfant terrible. The various sectional editions of the Advocate admired him but clucked like doting and alarmed hens over
his frequent improprieties. He was accused of every heresy. He never denied them, and the only dogma he was known to give
out positively was the leadership of Jesus—as to whose divinity he was indefinite.

He was a stocky, smiling man, fond of boxing, and even at a funeral incapable of breathing, “Ah, Sister!”

He criticized everything. He criticized even bishops—for being too fat, for being too ambitious, for gassing about
Charity during a knock-down-and-drag-out strike. He criticized, but amiably, the social and institutional and generally
philanthropic Dr. Otto Hickenlooper, with his clubs for the study of Karl Marx and his Sunday afternoon reception for lonely
traveling-men.

“You’re a good lad, Otto,” said Dr. McGarry—and openly, in the preachers’ Monday meetings: “You mean well, but you’re one
of these darned philanthropists.”

“Nice word to use publicly—‘darned’!” meditated the Reverend Elmer Gantry.

“All your stuff at Central, Otto,” said Dr. McGarry, “is paternalistic. You hand out rations to the dear pee-pul and keep
’em obedient. You talk about socialism and pacifism, and say a lot of nice things about ’em, but you always explain that
reforms must come in due time, which means never, and then only through the kind supervision of Rockefeller and Henry Ford.
And I always suspect that your activities have behind ’em the sneaking purpose of luring the poor chumps into religion—even
into Methodism!”

The whole ministerial meeting broke into yelps.

“Well, of course, that’s the purpose—”

“Well, if you’ll kindly tell me why you stay in the Methodist Church when you think it’s so unimportant to—”

“Just what are you, a minister of the gospel, seeking EXCEPT religion—”

The meeting, on such a morning, was certain to stray from the consideration of using egg-coal in church furnaces to the
question as to what, when they weren’t before their congregations and on record, they really believed about the whole
thing.

That was a very dangerous and silly thing, reflected Elmer Gantry. No telling where you’d get to, if you went blatting
around about a lot of these fool problems. Preach the straight Bible gospel and make folks good, he demanded, and leave all
these ticklish questions of theology and social service to the profs!

Philip McGarry wound up his cheerful attack on Dr. Hickenlooper, the first morning when Elmer disgustedly encountered
him, by insisting, “You see, Otto, your reforms couldn’t mean anything, or you wouldn’t be able to hold onto as many
prosperous money-grabbing parishioners as you do. No risk of the working-men in your church turning dangerous as long as
you’ve got that tight-fisted Joe Hanley as one of your trustees! Thank Heaven, I haven’t got a respectable person in my
whole blooming flock!”

(“Yeh, and there’s where you gave yourself away, McGarry,” Elmer chuckled inwardly. “That’s the first thing you’ve said
that’s true!”)

Philip McGarry’s church was in a part of the city incomparably more run-down than Elmer’s Old Town. It was called “The
Arbor”; it had in pioneer days been the vineyard-sheltered village, along the Chaloosa River, from which had grown the
modern Zenith. Now it was all dives, brothels, wretched tenements, cheap-jack shops. Yet here McGarry lived, a bachelor,
seemingly well content, counseling pickpockets and scrubwomen, and giving on Friday evenings a series of lectures packed by
eager Jewish girl students, radical workmen, old cranks, and wistful rich girls coming in limousines down from the spacious
gardens of Royal Ridge.

“I’ll have trouble with that McGarry if we both stay in this town. Him and I will never get along together,” thought
Elmer. “Well, I’ll keep away from him; I’ll treat him with some of this Christian charity that he talks so darn’ much about
and can’t understand the real meaning of! We’ll just dismiss him—and most of these other birds. But the big three—how’ll I
handle them?”

He could not, even if he should have a new church, outdo Chester Brown in ecclesiastical elegance or literary messages.
He could never touch Otto Hickenlooper in institutions and social service. He could never beat Mahlon Potts in appealing to
the well-to-do respectables.

Yet he could beat them all together!

Planning it delightedly, at the ministers’ meeting, on his way home, by the fireplace at night, he saw that each of these
stars was so specialized that he neglected the good publicity-bringing features of the others. Elmer would combine them; be
almost as elevating as Chester Brown, almost as solidly safe and moral as Mahlon Potts. And all three of them, in fact every
preacher in town except one Presbyterian, were neglecting the—well, some people called it sensational, but that was just
envy; the proper word, considered Elmer, was POWERFUL, or perhaps FEARLESS, or STIMULATING—all of them were neglecting a
powerful, fearless, or stimulating, and devil-challenging concentration on vice. Booze. Legs. Society bridge. You bet!

Not overdo it, of course, but the town would come to know that in the sermons of the Reverend Elmer Gantry there would
always be something spicy and yet improving.

“Oh, I can put it over the whole bunch!” Elmer stretched his big arms in joyous vigor. “I’ll build a new church. I’ll
take the crowds away from all of ’em. I’ll be the one big preacher in Zenith. And then—Chicago? New York? Bishopric?
Whatever I want! Whee!”