Elmer Gantry (6 page)

Then the hallelujahs rose till they drowned Elmer’s accelerated pleading, then Judson Roberts stood with his arm about
Elmer’s shoulder, then Elmer’s mother knelt with a light of paradise on her face, and they closed the meeting in a maniac
pealing of

Elmer felt himself victorious over life and king of righteousness.

But it had been only the devoted, the people who had come early and taken front seats, of whom he had been conscious in
his transports. The students who had remained at the back of the church now loitered outside the door in murmurous knots,
and as Elmer and his mother passed them, they stared, they even chuckled, and he was suddenly cold. . . .

It was hard to give heed to his mother’s wails of joy all the way to her boarding-house.

“Now don’t you dare think of getting up early to see me off on the train,” she insisted. “All I have to do is just to
carry my little valise across the street. You’ll need your sleep, after all this stirrin’ up you’ve had tonight—I was so
proud—I’ve never known anybody to really wrestle with the Lord like you did. Oh, Elmy, you’ll stay true? You’ve made your
old mother so happy! All my life I’ve sorrowed, I’ve waited, I’ve prayed and now I shan’t ever sorrow again! Oh, you will
stay true?”

He threw the last of his emotional reserve into a ringing, “You bet I will, Ma!” and kissed her good-night.

He had no emotion left with which to face walking alone, in a cold and realistic night, down a street not of shining
columns but of cottages dumpy amid the bleak snow and unfriendly under the bitter stars.

His plan of saving Jim Lefferts, his vision of Jim with reverent and beatific eyes, turned into a vision of Jim with
extremely irate eyes and a lot to say. With that vanishment his own glory vanished.

“Was I,” he wondered, “just a plain damn’ fool?

“Jim warned me they’d nab me if I lost my head.

“Now I suppose I can’t ever even smoke again without going to hell.”

But he wanted a smoke. Right now!

He had a smoke.

It comforted him but little as he fretted on:

“There WASN’T any fake about it! I really did repent all these darn’ fool sins. Even smoking—I’m going to cut it out. I
did feel the—the peace of God.

“But can I keep up this speed? Christ! I can’t DO it! Never take a drink or anything—

“I wonder if the Holy Ghost really was there and getting after me? I did feel different! I did! Or was it just because
Judson and Ma and all those Christers were there whooping it up—

“Jud Roberts kidded me into it. With all his Big Brother stuff. Prob’ly pulls it everywhere he goes. Jim’ll claim I—Oh,
damn Jim, too! I got some rights! None of his business if I come out and do the fair square thing! And they DID look up to
me when I gave them the invitation! It went off fine and dandy! And that kid coming right up and getting saved. Mighty few
fellows ever’ve pulled off a conversion as soon after their own conversion as I did! Moody or none of ’em. I’ll bet it busts
the records! Yes, sir, maybe they’re right. Maybe the Lord has got some great use for me, even if I ain’t always been all I
might of been . . . someways . . . but I was never mean or tough or anything like that . . . just had a good time.

“Jim—what right’s he got telling me where I head in? Trouble with him is, he thinks he knows it all. I guess these wise
old coots that’ve written all these books about the Bible, I guess they know more’n one smart-aleck Kansas agnostic!

“Yes, sir! The whole crowd! Turned to me like I was an All–American preacher!

“Wouldn’t be so bad to be a preacher if you had a big church and— Lot easier than digging out law-cases and having to put
it over a jury and another lawyer maybe smarter’n you are.

“The crowd have to swallow what you tell ’em in a pulpit, and no back-talk or cross-examination allowed!”

For a second he snickered, but:

“Not nice to talk that way. Even if a fellow don’t do what’s right himself, no excuse for his sneering at fellows that
do, like preachers. . . . There’s where Jim makes his mistake.

“Not worthy to be a preacher. But if Jim Lefferts thinks for one single solitary second that I’m afraid to be a preacher
because HE pulls a lot of gaff—I guess
I
know how I felt when I stood up and had all them folks hollering and
rejoicing—I guess
I
know whether I experienced salvation or not! And I don’t require any James Blaine Lefferts to
tell me, neither!”

Thus for an hour of dizzy tramping; now colder with doubt than with the prairie wind, now winning back some of the
exaltation of his spiritual adventure, but always knowing that he had to confess to an inexorable Jim.

It was after one. Surely Jim would be asleep, and by next day there might be a miracle. Morning always promises
miracles.

He eased the door open, holding it with a restraining hand. There was a light on the washstand beside Jim’s bed, but it
was a small kerosene lamp turned low. He tiptoed in, his tremendous feet squeaking.

Jim suddenly sat up, turned up the wick. He was red-nosed, red-eyed, and coughing. He stared, and unmoving, by the table,
Elmer stared back.

Jim spoke abruptly:

“You son of a sea-cook! You’ve gone and done it! You’ve been SAVED! You’ve let them hornswoggle you into being a Baptist
witch-doctor! I’m through! You can go—to heaven!”

“Aw, say now, Jim, lissen!”

“I’ve listened enough. I’ve got nothing more to say. And now you listen to me!” said Jim, and he spoke with tongues for
three minutes straight.

Most of the night they struggled for the freedom of Elmer’s soul, with Jim not quite losing yet never winning. As Jim’s
face had hovered at the gospel meeting between him and the evangelist, blotting out the vision of the cross, so now the
faces of his mother and Judson hung sorrowful and misty before him, a veil across Jim’s pleading.

Elmer slept four hours and went out, staggering with weariness, to bring cinnamon buns, a wienie sandwich, and a tin pail
of coffee for Jim’s breakfast. They were laboring windily into new arguments, Jim a little more stubborn, Elmer ever more
irritable, when no less a dignitary than President the Rev. Dr. Willoughby Quarles, chin whisker, glacial shirt, bulbous
waistcoat and all, plunged under the fat soft wing of the landlady.

The president shook hands a number of times with everybody, he eyebrowed the landlady out of the room, and boomed in his
throaty pulpit voice, with belly-rumblings and long-drawn R’s and L’s, a voice very deep and owlish, most holy and fitting
to the temple which he created merely by his presence, rebuking to flippancy and chuckles and the puerile cynicisms of the
Jim Leffertses—a noise somewhere between the evening bells and the morning jackass:

“Oh, Brother Elmer, that was a brave thing you did! I have never seen a braver! For a great strong man of your
gladiatorial powers to not be afraid to humble himself! And your example will do a great deal of good, a grrrrrreat deal of
good! And we must catch and hold it. You are to speak at the Y.M.C.A. tonight—special meeting to reenforce the results of
our wonderful Prayer Week.”

“Oh, gee, President, I can’t!” Elmer groaned.

“Oh, yes, Brother, you must. You MUST! It’s already announced. If you’ll go out within the next hour, you’ll be gratified
to see posters announcing it all over town!”

“But I can’t make a speech!”

“The Lord will give the words if you give the good will! I myself shall call for you at a quarter to seven. God bless
you!”

He was gone.

Elmer was completely frightened, completely unwilling, and swollen with delight that after long dark hours when Jim, an
undergraduate, had used him dirtily and thrown clods at his intellect, the President of Terwillinger College should have
welcomed him to that starched bosom as a fellow-apostle.

While Elmer was making up his mind to do what he had made up his mind to do, Jim crawled into bed and addressed the Lord
in a low poisonous tone.

Elmer went out to see the posters. His name was in lovely large letters.

For an hour, late that afternoon, after various classes in which every one looked at him respectfully, Elmer tried to
prepare his address for the Y.M.C.A. and affiliated lady worshipers. Jim was sleeping, with a snore like the snarl of a
leopard.

In his class in Public Speaking, a course designed to create congressmen, bishops, and sales-managers, Elmer had had to
produce discourses on Taxation, the Purpose of God in History, Our Friend the Dog, and the Glory of the American
Constitution. But his monthly orations had not been too arduous; no one had grieved if he stole all his ideas and most of
his phrasing from the encyclopedia. The most important part of preparation had been the lubrication of his polished-mahogany
voice with throat-lozenges after rather steady and totally forbidden smoking. He had learned nothing except the placing of
his voice. It had never seemed momentous to impress the nineteen students of oratory and the instructor, an unordained
licensed preacher who had formerly been a tax-assessor in Oklahoma. He had, in Public Speaking, never been a failure nor
ever for one second interesting.

Now, sweating very much, he perceived that he was expected to think, to articulate the curious desires whereby Elmer
Gantry was slightly different from any other human being, and to rivet together opinions which would not be floated on any
tide of hallelujahs.

He tried to remember the sermons he had heard. But the preachers had been so easily convinced of their authority as
prelates, so freighted with ponderous messages, while himself, he was not at the moment certain whether he was a missionary
who had to pass his surprising new light on to the multitude, or just a sinner who—

Just a sinner! For keeps! Nothing else! Damned if he’d welsh on old Jim! No, SIR! Or welsh on Juanita, who’d stood for
him and merely kidded him, no matter how soused and rough and mouthy he might be! . . . Her hug. The way she’d get rid of
that buttinsky aunt of Nell’s; just wink at him and give Aunty some song and dance or other and send her out for chow—

God! If Juanita were only here! She’d give him the real dope. She’d advise him whether he ought to tell Prexy and the
Y.M. to go to hell or grab this chance to show Eddie Fislinger and all those Y.M. highbrows that he wasn’t such a
bonehead—

No! Here Prexy had said he was the whole cheese: gotten up a big meeting for him. Prexy Quarles and Juanita! Aber nit!
Never get them two together! And Prexy had called on him—

Suppose it got into the newspapers! How he’d saved a tough kid, just as good as Judson Roberts could do. Juanita—find
skirts like her any place, but where could they find a guy that could start in and save souls right off the bat?

Chuck all these fool thoughts, now that Jim was asleep, and figure out this spiel. What was that about sweating in the
vineyard? Something like that, anyway. In the Bible. . . . However much they might rub it in-and no gink’d ever had a worse
time, with that sneaking Eddie poking him on one side and Jim lambasting him on the other—whatever happened, he had to show
those yahoos he could do just as good—

Hell! This wasn’t buying the baby any shoes; this wasn’t getting his spiel done. But—

What was the doggone thing to be ABOUT?

Let’s see now. Gee, there was a bully thought! Tell ’em about how a strong husky guy, the huskier he was the more he
could afford to admit that the power of the Holy Ghost had just laid him out cold—

No. Hell! That was what Old Jud had said. Must have something new—kinda new, anyway.

He shouldn’t say “hell.” Cut it out. Stay converted, no matter how hard it was. HE wasn’t afraid of—Him and Old Jud, they
were husky enough to—

No, sir! It wasn’t Old Jud; it was his mother. What’d she think if she ever saw him with Juanita? Juanita! That sloppy
brat! No modesty!

Had to get down to brass tacks. Now!

Elmer grasped the edge of his work-table. The top cracked. His strength pleased him. He pulled up his dingy red sweater,
smoothed his huge biceps, and again tackled his apostolic labors:

Let’s see now: The fellow at the Y. would expect him to say—

He had it! Nobody ever amounted to a darn except as the—what was it?—as the inscrutable designs of Providence intended
him to be.

Elmer was very busy making vast and unformed scrawls in a ten-cent-note-book hitherto devoted to German. He darted up,
looking scholarly, and gathered his library about him: his Bible, given to him by his mother; his New Testament, given by a
Sunday School teacher; his text-books in Weekly Bible and Church History; and one-fourteenth of a fourteen-volume set of
Great Orations of the World which, in a rare and alcoholic moment of bibliomania, he had purchased in Cato for seventeen
cents. He piled them and repiled them and tapped them with his fountain-pen.

His original stimulus had run out entirely.

Well, he’d get help from the Bible. It was all inspired, every word, no matter what scoffers like Jim said. He’d take the
first text he turned to and talk on that.

He opened on: “Now THEREFORE, Tatnai, governor beyond the river, Shethar-boznai, and your companions the Apharsachites,
which ARE beyond the river, be ye far from thence,” an injunction spirited but not at present helpful.

He returned to pulling his luxuriant hair and scratching.

Golly. Must be something.

The only way of putting it all over life was to understand these Forces that the scientists, with their laboratories and
everything, couldn’t savvy, but to a real Christian they were just as easy as rolling off a log—

No. He hadn’t taken any lab courses except Chemistry I, so he couldn’t show where all these physicists and biologists
were boobs.

Elmer forlornly began to cross out the lovely scrawls he had made in his note-book.

He was irritably conscious that Jim was awake, and scoffing:

“Having quite a time being holy and informative, Hell-cat? Why don’t you pinch your first sermon from the heathen? You
won’t be the first up-and-coming young messiah to do it!”

Jim shied a thin book at him, and sank again into infidel sleep. Elmer picked up the book. It was a selection from the
writings of Robert G. Ingersoll.

Elmer was indignant.

Take his speech from Ingersoll, that rotten old atheist that said— well, anyway, he criticized the Bible and everything!
Fellow that couldn’t believe the Bible, least he could do was not to disturb the faith of others. Darn’ rotten thing to do!
Fat nerve of Jim to suggest his pinching anything from Ingersoll! He’d throw the book in the fire!

But—Anything was better than going on straining his brains. He forgot his woes by drugging himself with heedless reading.
He drowsed through page on page of Ingersoll’s rhetoric and jesting. Suddenly he sat up, looked suspiciously over at the
silenced Jim, looked suspiciously at Heaven. He grunted, hesitated, and began rapidly to copy into the German notebook, from
Ingersoll:

Love is the only bow on life’s dark cloud. It is the Morning and the Evening Star. It shines upon the cradle of the babe,
and sheds its radiance upon the quiet tomb. It is the mother of Art, inspirer of poet, patriot and philosopher. It is the
air and light of every heart, builder of every home, kindler of every fire on every hearth. It was the first to dream of
immortality. It fills the world with melody, for Music is the voice of Love. Love is the magician, the enchanter, that
changes worthless things to joy, and makes right royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the perfume of the wondrous
flower—the heart—and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven
and we are gods.

Only for a moment, while he was copying, did he look doubtful; then:

“Rats! Chances are nobody there tonight has ever read Ingersoll. Agin him. Besides I’ll kind of change it around.”