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Title:      Elmer Gantry (1927)
Author:     Sinclair Lewis
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eBook No.:  0300851.txt
Language:   English
Date first posted:          May 2003
Date most recently updated: May 2003

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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Elmer Gantry (1927)
Author:     Sinclair Lewis





To H. L. MENCKEN with profound admiration




No character in this book is the portrait of any actual person.

S. L.




CHAPTER I


1


Elmer Gantry was drunk.  He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and
pugnaciously drunk.  He leaned against the bar of the Old Home
Sample Room, the most gilded and urbane saloon in Cato, Missouri,
and requested the bartender to join him in "The Good Old Summer
Time," the waltz of the day.

Blowing on a glass, polishing it and glancing at Elmer through its
flashing rotundity, the bartender remarked that he wasn't much of a
hand at this here singing business.  But he smiled.  No bartender
could have done other than smile on Elmer, so inspired and full of
gallantry and hell-raising was he, and so dominating was his beefy
grin.

"All right, old socks," agreed Elmer.  "Me and my room-mate'll show
you some singing as is singing!  Meet roommate.  Jim Lefferts.
Bes' roommate in world.  Wouldn't live with him if wasn't!  Bes'
quarterback in Milwest.  Meet roommate."

The bartender again met Mr. Lefferts, with protestations of
distinguished pleasure.

Elmer and Jim Lefferts retired to a table to nourish the long,
rich, chocolate strains suitable to drunken melody.  Actually, they
sang very well.  Jim had a resolute tenor, and as to Elmer Gantry,
even more than his bulk, his thick black hair, his venturesome
black eyes, you remembered that arousing barytone.  He was born to
be a senator.  He never said anything important, and he always said
it sonorously.  He could make "Good morning" seem profound as Kant,
welcoming as a brass band, and uplifting as a cathedral organ.  It
was a 'cello, his voice, and in the enchantment of it you did not
hear his slang, his boasting, his smut, and the dreadful violence
which (at this period) he performed on singulars and plurals.

Luxuriously as a wayfarer drinking cool beer they caressed the
phrases in linked sweetness long drawn out:


 Strolling through the shaaaaady lanes, with your baby-mine,
 You hold her hand and she holds yours, and that's a very good sign
 That she's your tootsey-wootsey in the good old summer time.


Elmer wept a little, and blubbered, "Lez go out and start a scrap.
You're lil squirt, Jim.  You get somebody to pick on you, and I'll
come along and knock his block off.  I'll show 'em!"  His voice
flared up.  He was furious at the wrong about to be suffered.  He
arched his paws with longing to grasp the non-existent scoundrel.
"By God, I'll knock the tar out of um!  Nobody can touch MY
roommate!  Know who I am?  Elmer Gantry!  Thash me!  I'll show um!"

The bartender was shuffling toward them, amiably ready for
homicide.

"Shut up, Hell-cat.  What you need is 'nother drink.  I'll get
'nother drink," soothed Jim, and Elmer slid into tears, weeping
over the ancient tragic sorrows of one whom he remembered as Jim
Lefferts.

Instantly, by some tricky sort of magic, there were two glasses in
front of him.  He tasted one, and murmured foolishly, "'Scuse me."
It was the chase, the water.  But they couldn't fool him!  The
whisky would certainly be in that other lil sawed-off glass.  And
it was.  He was right, as always.  With a smirk of self-admiration
he sucked in the raw Bourbon.  It tickled his throat and made him
feel powerful, and at peace with every one save that fellow--he
could not recall who, but it was some one whom he would shortly
chastise, and after that float into an Elysium of benevolence.

The barroom was deliriously calming.  The sour invigorating stench
of beer made him feel healthy.  The bar was one long shimmer of
beauty--glowing mahogany, exquisite marble rail, dazzling glasses,
curiously shaped bottles of unknown liqueurs, piled with a
craftiness which made him very happy.  The light was dim,
completely soothing, coming through fantastic windows such as are
found only in churches, saloons, jewelry shops, and other retreats
from reality.  On the brown plaster walls were sleek naked girls.

He turned from them.  He was empty now of desire for women.

"That damn' Juanita.  Jus' wants to get all she can out of you.
That's all," he grumbled.

But there was an interesting affair beside him.  A piece of
newspaper sprang up, apparently by itself, and slid along the
floor.  That was a very funny incident, and he laughed greatly.

He was conscious of a voice which he had been hearing for
centuries, echoing from a distant point of light and flashing
through ever-widening corridors of a dream.

"We'll get kicked out of here, Hell-cat.  Come on!"

He floated up.  It was exquisite.  His legs moved by themselves,
without effort.  They did a comic thing once--they got twisted and
the right leg leaped in front of the left when, so far as he could
make out, it should have been behind.  He laughed, and rested
against some one's arm, an arm with no body attached to it, which
had come out of the Ewigkeit to assist him.

Then unknown invisible blocks, miles of them, his head clearing,
and he made grave announcement to a Jim Lefferts who suddenly
seemed to be with him:

"I gotta lick that fellow."

"All right, all RIGHT.  You might as well go find a nice little
fight and get it out of your system!"

Elmer was astonished; he was grieved.  His mouth hung open and he
drooled with sorrow.  But still, he was to be allowed one charming
fight, and he revived as he staggered industriously in search of
it.

Oh, he exulted, it was a great party.  For the first time in weeks
he was relieved from the boredom of Terwillinger College.


2


Elmer Gantry, best known to classmates as Hell-cat, had, this
autumn of 1902, been football captain and led the best team
Terwillinger College had known in ten years.  They had won the
championship of the East-middle Kansas Conference, which consisted
of ten denominational colleges, all of them with buildings and
presidents and chapel services and yells and colors and a standard
of scholarship equal to the best high-schools.  But since the last
night of the football season, with the glorious bonfire in which
the young gentlemen had burned up nine tar barrels, the sign of the
Jew tailor, and the president's tabby-cat, Elmer had been tortured
by boredom.

He regarded basket-ball and gymnasium antics as light-minded for a
football gladiator.  When he had come to college, he had supposed
he would pick up learnings of cash-value to a lawyer or doctor or
insurance man--he had not known which he would become, and in his
senior year, aged twenty-two this November, he still was doubtful.
But this belief he found fallacious.  What good would it be in the
courtroom, or at the operating table, to understand trigonometry,
or to know (as last spring, up to the examination on European
History, he remembered having known) the date of Charlemagne?  How
much cash would it bring in to quote all that stuff--what the
dickens was it now?--all that rot about "The world is too much
around us, early and soon" from that old fool Wordsworth?

Punk, that's what it was.  Better be out in business.  But still,
if his mother claimed she was doing so well with her millinery
business and wanted him to be a college graduate, he'd stick by it.
Lot easier than pitching hay or carrying two-by-fours anyway.

Despite his invaluable voice, Elmer had not gone out for debating
because of the irritating library-grinding, nor had he taken to
prayer and moral eloquence in the Y.M.C.A., for with all the force
of his simple and valiant nature he detested piety and admired
drunkenness and profanity.

Once or twice in the class in Public Speaking, when he had repeated
the splendors of other great thinkers, Dan'l Webster and Henry Ward
Beecher and Chauncey M. Depew, he had known the intoxication of
holding an audience with his voice as with his closed hand, holding
it, shaking it, lifting it.  The debating set urged him to join
them, but they were rabbit-faced and spectacled young men, and he
viewed as obscene the notion of digging statistics about
immigration and the products of San Domingo out of dusty spotted
books in the dusty spotted library.

He kept from flunking only because Jim Lefferts drove him to his
books.

Jim was less bored by college.  He had a relish for the flavor of
scholarship.  He liked to know things about people dead these
thousand years, and he liked doing canned miracles in chemistry.
Elmer was astounded that so capable a drinker, a man so deft at
"handing a girl a swell spiel and getting her going" should find
entertainment in Roman chariots and the unenterprising amours of
sweet-peas.  But himself--no.  Not on your life.  He'd get out and
finish law school and never open another book--kid the juries along
and hire some old coot to do the briefs.

To keep him from absolutely breaking under the burden of hearing
the professors squeak, he did have the joy of loafing with Jim,
illegally smoking the while; he did have researches into the
lovability of co-eds and the baker's daughter; he did revere
becoming drunk and world-striding.  But he could not afford liquor
very often and the co-eds were mostly ugly and earnest.

It was lamentable to see this broad young man, who would have been
so happy in the prize-ring, the fish-market, or the stock exchange,
poking through the cobwebbed corridors of Terwillinger.


3


Terwillinger College, founded and preserved by the more zealous
Baptists, is on the outskirts of Gritzmacher Springs, Kansas.
(The springs have dried up and the Gritzmachers have gone to Los
Angeles, to sell bungalows and delicatessen.)  It huddles on the
prairie, which is storm-racked in winter, frying and dusty in
summer, lovely only in the grass-rustling spring or drowsy autumn.

You would not be likely to mistake Terwillinger College for an Old
Folks' Home, because on the campus is a large rock painted with
class numerals.

Most of the faculty are ex-ministers.

There is a men's dormitory, but Elmer Gantry and Jim Lefferts lived
together in the town, in a mansion once the pride of the
Gritzmachers themselves: a square brick bulk with a white cupola.
Their room was unchanged from the days of the original August
Gritzmacher; a room heavy with a vast bed of carved black walnut,
thick and perpetually dusty brocade curtains, and black walnut
chairs hung with scarves that dangled gilt balls.  The windows were
hard to open.  There was about the place the anxious propriety and
all the dead hopes of a second-hand furniture shop.

In this museum, Jim had a surprising and vigorous youthfulness.
There was a hint of future flabbiness in Elmer's bulk, but there
would never be anything flabby about Jim Lefferts.  He was slim,
six inches shorter than Elmer, but hard as ivory and as sleek.
Though he came from a prairie village, Jim had fastidiousness, a
natural elegance.  All the items of his wardrobe, the "ordinary
suit," distinctly glossy at the elbows, and the dark-brown "best
suit," were ready-made, with faltering buttons, and seams that
betrayed rough ends of thread, but on him they were graceful.  You
felt that he would belong to any set in the world which he
sufficiently admired.  There was a romantic flare to his upturned
overcoat collar; the darned bottoms of his trousers did not suggest
poverty but a careless and amused ease; and his thoroughly
commonplace ties hinted of clubs and regiments.

His thin face was resolute.  You saw only its youthful freshness
first, then behind the brightness a taut determination, and his
brown eyes were amiably scornful.

Jim Lefferts was Elmer's only friend; the only authentic friend he
had ever had.

Though Elmer was the athletic idol of the college, though his
occult passion, his heavy good looks, caused the college girls to
breathe quickly, though his manly laughter was as fetching as his
resonant speech, Elmer was never really liked.  He was supposed to
be the most popular man in college; every one believed that every
one else adored him; and none of them wanted to be with him.  They
were all a bit afraid, a bit uncomfortable, and more than a bit
resentful.

It was not merely that he was a shouter, a pounder on backs, an
overwhelming force, so that there was never any refuge of intimacy
with him.  It was because he was always demanding.  Except with his
widow mother, whom he vaguely worshiped, and with Jim Lefferts,
Elmer assumed that he was the center of the universe and that the
rest of the system was valuable only as it afforded him help and
pleasure.

He wanted everything.

His first year, as the only Freshman who was playing on the college
football team, as a large and smiling man who was expected to
become a favorite, he was elected president.  In that office, he
was not much beloved.  At class-meetings he cut speakers short,
gave the floor only to pretty girls and lads who toadied to him,
and roared in the midst of the weightiest debates, "Aw, come on,
cut out this chewing the rag and let's get down to business!"  He
collected the class-fund by demanding subscriptions as arbitrarily
as a Catholic priest assessing his parishoners for a new church.

"He'll never hold any office again, not if I can help it!" muttered
one Eddie Fislinger, who, though he was a meager and rusty-haired
youth with protruding teeth and an uneasy titter, had attained
power in the class by always being present at everything, and by
the piety and impressive intimacy of his prayers in the Y.M.C.A.

There was a custom that the manager of the Athletic Association
should not be a member of any team.  Elmer forced himself into the
managership in Junior year by threatening not to play football if
he were not elected.  He appointed Jim Lefferts chairman of the
ticket committee, and between them, by only the very slightest
doctoring of the books, they turned forty dollars to the best of
all possible uses.

At the beginning of Senior year, Elmer announced that he desired to
be president again.  To elect any one as class-president twice was
taboo.  The ardent Eddie Fislinger, now president of the Y.M.C.A.
and ready to bring his rare talents to the Baptist ministry,
asserted after an enjoyable private prayer-meeting in his room that
he was going to face Elmer and forbid him to run.

"Gwan!  You don't dare!" observed a Judas who three minutes before
had been wrestling with God under Eddie's coaching.

"I don't, eh?  Watch me!  Why, everybody hates him, the darn' hog!"
squeaked Eddie.

By scurrying behind trees he managed to come face to face with
Elmer on the campus.  He halted, and spoke of football,
quantitative chemistry, and the Arkansas spinster who taught
German.

Elmer grunted.

Desperately, his voice shrill with desire to change the world,
Eddie stammered:

"Say--say, Hell-cat, you hadn't ought to run for president again.
Nobody's ever president twice!"

"Somebody's going to be."

"Ah, gee, Elmer, don't run for it.  Ah, come on.  Course all the
fellows are crazy about you but--Nobody's ever been president
twice.  They'll vote against you."

"Let me catch 'em at it!"

"How can you stop it?  Honest, Elm--Hell-cat--I'm just speaking for
your own good.  The voting's secret.  You can't tell--"

"Huh!  The nominations ain't secret!  Now you go roll your hoop,
Fissy, and let all the yellow coyotes know that anybody that
nominates anybody except Uncle Hell-cat will catch it right where
the chicken caught the ax.  See?  And if they tell me they didn't
know about this, you'll get merry Hail Columbia for not telling
'em.  Get me?  If there's anything but an unanimous vote, you won't
do any praying the rest of this year!"

Eddie remembered how Elmer and Jim had shown a Freshman his place
in society by removing all his clothes and leaving him five miles
in the country.

Elmer was elected president of the senior class--unanimously.

He did not know that he was unpopular.  He reasoned that men who
seemed chilly to him were envious and afraid, and that gave him a
feeling of greatness.

Thus it happened that he had no friend save Jim Lefferts.

Only Jim had enough will to bully him into obedient admiration.
Elmer swallowed ideas whole; he was a maelstrom of prejudices; but
Jim accurately examined every notion that came to him.  Jim was
selfish enough, but it was with the selfishness of a man who thinks
and who is coldly unafraid of any destination to which his thoughts
may lead him.  The little man treated Elmer like a large damp dog,
and Elmer licked his shoes and followed.

He also knew that Jim, as quarter, was far more the soul of the
team than himself as tackle and captain.

A huge young man, Elmer Gantry; six foot one, thick, broad, big
handed; a large face, handsome as a Great Dane is handsome, and a
swirl of black hair, worn rather long.  His eyes were friendly, his
smile was friendly--oh, he was always friendly enough; he was
merely astonished when he found that you did not understand his
importance and did not want to hand over anything he might desire.
He was a barytone solo turned into portly flesh; he was a gladiator
laughing at the comic distortion of his wounded opponent.

He could not understand men who shrank from blood, who liked poetry
or roses, who did not casually endeavor to seduce every possibly
seducible girl.  In sonorous arguments with Jim he asserted that
"these fellows that study all the time are just letting on like
they're so doggone high and mighty, to show off to those doggone
profs that haven't got anything but lemonade in their veins."


4


Chief adornment of their room was the escritoire of the first
Gritzmacher, which held their library.  Elmer owned two volumes of
Conan Doyle, one of E. P. Roe, and a priceless copy of "Only a
Boy."  Jim had invested in an encyclopedia which explained any
known subject in ten lines, in a "Pickwick Papers," and from some
unknown source he had obtained a complete Swinburne, into which he
was never known to have looked.

But his pride was in the possession of Ingersoll's "Some Mistakes
of Moses," and Paine's "The Age of Reason."  For Jim Lefferts was
the college freethinker, the only man in Terwillinger who doubted
that Lot's wife had been changed into salt for once looking back at
the town where, among the young married set, she had had so good a
time; who doubted that Methuselah lived to nine hundred and sixty-
nine.

They whispered of Jim all through the pious dens of Terwillinger.
Elmer himself was frightened, for after giving minutes and minutes
to theological profundities Elmer had concluded that "there must be
something to all this religious guff if all these wise old birds
believe it, and some time a fellow had ought to settle down and cut
out the hell-raising."  Probably Jim would have been kicked out of
college by the ministerial professors if he had not had so reverent
a way of asking questions when they wrestled with his infidelity
that they let go of him in nervous confusion.

Even the President, the Rev. Dr. Willoughby Quarles, formerly
pastor of the Rock of Ages Baptist Church of Moline, Ill., than
whom no man had written more about the necessity of baptism by
immersion, in fact in every way a thoroughly than-whom figure--even
when Dr. Quarles tackled Jim and demanded, "Are you getting the
best out of our instruction, young man?  Do you believe with us not
only in the plenary inspiration of the Bible but also in its verbal
inspiration, and that it is the only divine rule of faith and
practise?" then Jim looked docile and said mildly:

"Oh, yes, Doctor.  There's just one or two little things that have
been worrying me, Doctor.  I've taken them to the Lord in prayer,
but he doesn't seem to help me much.  I'm sure you can.  Now why
did Joshua need to have the sun stand still?  Of course it
happened--it SAYS so right in Scripture.  But why did he need to,
when the Lord always helped those Jews, anyway, and when Joshua
could knock down big walls just by having his people yell and blow
trumpets?  And if devils cause a lot of the diseases, and they had
to cast 'em out, why is it that good Baptist doctors today don't go
on diagnosing devil-possession instead of T. B. and things like
that?  DO people have devils?"

"Young man, I will give you an infallible rule.  Never question the
ways of the Lord!"

"But why don't the doctors talk about having devils now?"

"I have no time for vain arguments that lead nowhere!  If you would
think a little less of your wonderful powers of reasoning, if you'd
go humbly to God in prayer and give him a chance, you'd understand
the true spiritual significances of all these things."

"But how about where Cain got his wife--"

Most respectfully Jim said it, but Dr. Quarles (he had a chin-
whisker and a boiled shirt) turned from him and snapped, "I have no
further time to give you, young man!  I've told you what to do.
Good morning!"

That evening Mrs. Quarles breathed, "Oh, Willoughby, did you 'tend
to that awful senior--that Lefferts--that's trying to spread doubt?
Did you fire him?"

"No," blossomed President Quarles.  "Certainly not.  There was no
need.  I showed him how to look for spiritual guidance and--Did
that freshman come and mow the lawn?  The idea of him wanting
fifteen cents an hour!"

Jim was hair-hung and breeze-shaken over the abyss of hell, and
apparently enjoying it very much indeed, while his wickedness
fascinated Elmer Gantry and terrified him.


5


That November day of 1902, November of their Senior year, was
greasy of sky, and slush blotted the wooden sidewalks of
Gritzmacher Springs.  There was nothing to do in town, and their
room was dizzying with the stench of the stove, first lighted now
since spring.

Jim was studying German, tilted back in an elegant position of
ease, with his legs cocked up on the desk tablet of the escritoire.
Elmer lay across the bed, ascertaining whether the blood would run
to his head if he lowered it over the side.  It did, always.

"Oh, God, let's get out and do something!" he groaned.

"Nothing to do, Useless," said Jim.

"Let's go over to Cato and see the girls and get drunk."

As Kansas was dry, by state prohibition, the nearest haven was at
Cato, Missouri, seventeen miles away.

Jim scratched his head with a corner of his book and approved:

"Well, that's a worthy idea.  Got any money?"

"On the twenty-eighth?  Where the hell would I get any money before
the first?"

"Hell-cat, you've got one of the deepest intellects I know.  You'll
be a knock-out at the law.  Aside from neither of us having any
money, and me with a Dutch quiz tomorrow, it's a great project."

"Oh, well--" sighed ponderous Elmer, feebly as a sick kitten, and
lay revolving the tremendous inquiry.

It was Jim who saved them from the lard-like weariness into which
they were slipping.  He had gone back to his book, but he placed
it, precisely and evenly, on the desk, and rose.

"I would like to see Nellie," he sighed.  "Oh, man, I could give
her a good time!  Little Devil!  Damn these co-eds here.  The few
that'll let you love 'em up, they hang around trying to catch you
on the campus and make you propose to 'em."

"Oh, gee!  And I got to see Juanita," groaned Elmer.  "Hey, cut out
talking about 'em will you!  I've got a palpitating heart right
now, just thinking about Juanny!"

"Hell-cat!  I've got it.  Go and borrow ten off this new instructor
in chemistry and physics.  I've got a dollar sixty-four left, and
that'll make it."

"But I don't know him."

"Sure, you poor fish.  That's why I suggested him!  Do the check-
failed-to-come.  I'll get another hour of this Dutch while you're
stealing the ten from him--"

"Now," lugubriously, "you oughtn't to talk like that!"

"If you're as good a thief as I think you are, we'll catch the
five-sixteen to Cato."

They were on the five-sixteen for Cato.

The train consisted of a day coach, a combined smoker and baggage
car, and a rusty old engine and tender.  The train swayed so on the
rough tracks as it bumped through the dropping light that Elmer and
Jim were thrown against each other and gripped the arm of their
seat.  The car staggered like a freighter in a gale.  And tall raw
farmers, perpetually shuffling forward for a drink at the water-
cooler, stumbled against them or seized Jim's shoulder to steady
themselves.

To every surface of the old smoking-car, to streaked windows and
rusty ironwork and mud-smeared cocoanut matting, clung a sickening
bitterness of cheap tobacco fumes, and whenever they touched the
red plush of the seat, dust whisked up and the prints of their
hands remained on the plush.  The car was jammed.  Passengers came
to sit on the arm of their seat to shout at friends across the
aisle.

But Elmer and Jim were unconscious of filth and smell and crowding.
They sat silent, nervously intent, panting a little, their lips
open, their eyes veiled, as they thought of Juanita and Nellie.

The two girls, Juanita Klauzel and Nellie Benton, were by no means
professional daughters of joy.  Juanita was cashier of the Cato
Lunch--Quick Eats; Nellie was assistant to a dressmaker.  They were
good girls but excitable, and they found a little extra money
useful for red slippers and nut-center chocolates.

"Juanita--what a lil darling--she understands a fellow's troubles,"
said Elmer, as they balanced down the slushy steps at the grimy
stone station of Cato.

When Elmer, as a Freshman just arrived from the pool-halls and
frame high school of Paris, Kansas, had begun to learn the decorum
of amour, he had been a boisterous lout who looked shamefaced in
the presence of gay ladies, who blundered against tables, who
shouted and desired to let the world know how valiantly vicious he
was being.  He was still rather noisy and proud of wickedness when
he was in a state of liquor, but in three and a quarter years of
college he had learned how to approach girls.  He was confident, he
was easy, he was almost quiet; he could look them in the eye with
fondness and amusement.

Juanita and Nellie lived with Nellie's widow aunt--she was a moral
lady, but she knew how to keep out of the way--in three rooms over
a corner grocery.  They had just returned from work when Elmer and
Jim stamped up the rickety outside wooden steps.  Juanita was
lounging on a divan which even a noble Oriental red and yellow
cover (displaying a bearded Wazir, three dancing ladies in chiffon
trousers, a narghile, and a mosque slightly larger than the
narghile) could never cause to look like anything except a
disguised bed.  She was curled up, pinching her ankle with one
tired and nervous hand, and reading a stimulating chapter of Laura
Jean Libbey.  Her shirt-waist was open at the throat, and down her
slim stocking was a grievous run.  She was so un-Juanita-like--an
ash-blonde, pale and lovely, with an ill-restrained passion in her
blue eyes.

Nellie, a buxom jolly child, dark as a Jewess, was wearing a frowsy
dressing-gown.  She was making coffee and narrating her grievances
against her employer, the pious dressmaker, while Juanita paid no
attention whatever.  The young men crept into the room without
knocking.  "You devils--sneaking in like this, and us not dressed!"
yelped Nellie.

Jim sidled up to her, dragged her plump hand away from the handle
of the granite-ware coffee-pot, and giggled, "But aren't you glad
to see us?"

"I don't know whether I AM or not!  Now you quit!  You behave, will
you?"

Rarely did Elmer seem more deft than Jim Lefferts.  But now he was
feeling his command over women--certain sorts of women.  Silent,
yearning at Juanita, commanding her with hot eyes, he sank on the
temporarily Oriental couch, touched her pale hand with his broad
finger-tips, and murmured, "Why you poor kid, you look so tired!"

"I am and--You hadn't ought to come here this afternoon.  Nell's
aunt threw a conniption fit the last time you were here."

"Hurray for aunty!  But YOU'RE glad to see me?"

She would not answer.

"Aren't you?"

Bold eyes on hers that turned uneasily away, looked back, and
sought the safety of the blank wall.

"Aren't you?"

She would not answer.

"Juanita!  And I've longed for you something fierce, ever since I
saw you!"  His fingers touched her throat, but softly.  "Aren't you
a LITTLE glad?"

As she turned her head, for a second she looked at him with
embarrassed confession.  She sharply whispered, "No--don't!" as he
caught her hand, but she moved nearer to him, leaned against his
shoulder.

"You're so big and strong," she sighed.

"But, golly, you don't know how I need you!  The president, old
Quarles--quarrels is right, by golly, ha, ha, ha!--'member I was
telling you about him?--he's laying for me because he thinks it was
me and Jim that let the bats loose in chapel.  And I get so sick of
that gosh-awful Weekly Bible Study--all about these holy old
gazebos.  And then I think about you, and gosh, if you were just
sitting on the other side of the stove from me in my room there,
with your cute lil red slippers cocked up on the nickel rail--gee,
how happy I'd be!  You don't think I'm just a bonehead, do you?"

Jim and Nellie were at the stage now of nudging each other and
bawling, "Hey, quit, will yuh!" as they stood over the coffee.

"Say, you girls change your shirts and come on out and we'll blow
you to dinner, and maybe we'll dance a little," proclaimed Jim.

"We can't," said Nellie.  "Aunty's sore as a pup because we was up
late at a dance night before last.  We got to stay home, and you
boys got to beat it before she comes in."

"Aw, come ON!"

"No, we CAN'T!"

"Yuh, fat chance you girls staying home and knitting!  You got some
fellows coming in and you want to get rid of us, that's what's the
trouble."

"It is not, Mr. James Lefferts, and it wouldn't be any of your
business if it was!"

While Jim and Nellie squabbled, Elmer slipped his hand about
Juanita's shoulder, slowly pressed her against him.  He believed
with terrible conviction that she was beautiful, that she was
glorious, that she was life.  There was heaven in the softness of
her curving shoulder, and her pale flesh was living silk.

"Come on in the other room," he pleaded.

"Oh--no--not now."

He gripped her arm.

"Well--don't come in for a minute," she fluttered.  Aloud, to the
others, "I'm going to do my hair.  Looks just TER-ble!"

She slipped into the room beyond.  A certain mature self-reliance
dropped from Elmer's face, and he was like a round-faced big baby,
somewhat frightened.  With efforts to appear careless, he fumbled
about the room and dusted a pink and gilt vase with his large
crumpled handkerchief.  He was near the inner door.

He peeped at Jim and Nellie.  They were holding hands, while the
coffee-pot was cheerfully boiling over.  Elmer's heart thumped.  He
slipped through the door and closed it, whimpering, as in terror:

"Oh--Juanita--"


6


They were gone, Elmer and Jim, before the return of Nellie's aunt.
As they were not entertaining the girls, they dined on pork chops,
coffee, and apple pie at the Maginnis Lunch.

It has already been narrated that afterward, in the Old Home Sample
Room, Elmer became philosophical and misogynistic as he reflected
that Juanita was unworthy of his generous attention; it has been
admitted that he became drunk and pugnacious.

As he wavered through the sidewalk slush, on Jim's arm, as his head
cleared, his rage increased against the bully who was about to be
encouraged to insult his goo' frien' and roommate.  His shoulders
straightened, his fists clenched, and he began to look for the
scoundrel among the evening crowd of mechanics and coal-miners.

They came to the chief corner of the town.  A little way down the
street, beside the red brick wall of the Congress Hotel, some one
was talking from the elevation of a box, surrounded by a jeering
gang.

"What they picking on that fella that's talking for?  They better
let him alone!" rejoiced Elmer, throwing off Jim's restraining
hand, dashing down the side street and into the crowd.  He was in
that most blissful condition to which a powerful young man can
attain--unrighteous violence in a righteous cause.  He pushed
through the audience, jabbed his elbow into the belly of a small
weak man, and guffawed at the cluck of distress.  Then he came to a
halt, unhappy and doubting.

The heckled speaker was his chief detestation, Eddie Fislinger,
president of the Terwillinger College Y.M.C.A., that rusty-haired
gopher who had obscenely opposed his election as president.

With two other seniors who were also in training for the Baptist
ministry, Eddie had come over to Cato to save a few souls.  At
least, if they saved no souls (and they never had saved any, in
seventeen street meetings) they would have handy training for their
future jobs.

Eddie was a rasping and insistent speaker who got results by
hanging to a subject and worrying it, but he had no great boldness,
and now he was obviously afraid of his chief heckler, a large,
blond, pompadoured young baker, who bulked in front of Eddie's
rostrum and asked questions.  While Elmer stood listening, the
baker demanded:

"What makes you think you know all about religion?"

"I don't pretend to know all about religion, my friend, but I do
know what a powerful influence it is for clean and noble living,
and if you'll only be fair now, my friend, and give me a chance to
tell these other gentlemen what my experience of answers to prayer
has been--"

"Yuh, swell lot of experience you've had, by your looks!"

"See here, there are others who may want to hear--"

Though Elmer detested Eddie's sappiness, though he might have liked
to share drinks with the lively young baker-heckler, there was no
really good unctuous violence to be had except by turning champion
of religion.  The packed crowd excited him, and the pressure of
rough bodies, the smell of wet overcoats, the rumble of mob voices.
It was like a football line-up.

"Here, you!" he roared at the baker.  "Let the fellow speak!  Give
him a chance.  Whyn't you pick on somebody your own size, you big
stiff!"

At his elbow, Jim Lefferts begged, "Let's get out of this, Hell-
cat.  Good Lord!  You ain't going to help a gospel-peddler!"

Elmer pushed him away and thrust his chest out toward the baker,
who was cackling, "Heh!  I suppose you're a Christer, too!"

"I would be, if I was worthy!"  Elmer fully believed it, for that
delightful moment.  "These boys are classmates of mine, and they're
going to have a chance to speak!"

Eddie Fislinger bleated to his mates, "Oh, fellows, Elm Gantry!
Saved!"

Even this alarming interpretation of his motives could not keep
Elmer now from the holy zeal of fighting.  He thrust aside the one
aged man who stood between him and the baker--bashing in the aged
one's derby and making him telescope like a turtle's neck--and
stood with his fist working like a connecting-rod by his side.

"If you're looking for trouble--" the baker suggested, clumsily
wobbling his huge bleached fists.

"Not me," observed Elmer and struck, once, very judiciously, just
at the point of the jaw.

The baker shook like a skyscraper in an earthquake and caved to the
earth.

One of the baker's pals roared, "Come on, we'll kill them guys
and--"

Elmer caught him on the left ear.  It was a very cold ear, and the
pal staggered, extremely sick.  Elmer looked pleased.  But he did
not feel pleased.  He was almost sober, and he realized that half a
dozen rejoicing young workmen were about to rush him.  Though he
had an excellent opinion of himself, he had seen too much football,
as played by denominational colleges with the Christian 
accompaniments of kneeing and gouging, to imagine that he could
beat half a dozen workmen at once.

It is doubtful whether he would ever have been led to further
association with the Lord and Eddie Fislinger had not Providence
intervened in its characteristically mysterious way.  The foremost
of the attackers was just reaching for Elmer when the mob shouted,
"Look out!  The cops!"

The police force of Cato, all three of them, were wedging into the
crowd.  They were lanky, mustached men with cold eyes.

"What's all this row about?" demanded the chief.

He was looking at Elmer, who was three inches taller than any one
else in the assembly.

"Some of these fellows tried to stop a peaceable religious
assembly--why, they tried to rough-house the Reverend here--and I
was protecting him," Elmer said.

"That's right, Chief.  Reg'lar outrage," complained Jim.

"That's true, Chief," whistled Eddie Fislinger from his box.

"Well, you fellows cut it out now.  What the hell!  Ought to be
ashamed yourselves, bullyragging a Reverend!  Go ahead, Reverend!"

The baker had come to, and had been lifted to his feet.  His
expression indicated that he had been wronged and that he wanted to
do something about it, if he could only find out what had happened.
His eyes were wild, his hair was a muddy chaos, and his flat floury
cheek was cut.  He was too dizzy to realize that the chief of
police was before him, and his fumbling mind stuck to the belief
that he was destroying all religion.

"Yah, so you're one of them wishy-washy preachers, too!" he
screamed at Elmer--just as one of the lanky policemen reached out
an arm of incredible length and nipped him.

The attention of the crowd warmed Elmer, and he expanded in it,
rubbed his mental hands in its blaze.

"Maybe I ain't a preacher!  Maybe I'm not even a good Christian!"
he cried.  "Maybe I've done a whole lot of things I hadn't ought to
of done.  But let me tell you, I respect religion--"

"Oh, amen, praise the Lord, brother," from Eddie Fislinger.

"--and I don't propose to let anybody interfere with it.  What else
have we got except religion to give us hope--"

"Praise the Lord, oh, bless his name!"

"--of EVER leading decent lives, tell me that, will you, just tell
me that!"

Elmer was addressing the chief of police, who admitted:

"Yuh, I guess that's right.  Well now, we'll let the meeting go on,
and if any more of you fellows interrupt--"  This completed the
chief's present ideas on religion and mob-violence.  He looked
sternly at everybody within reach, and stalked through the crowd,
to return to the police station and resume his game of seven-up.

Eddie was soaring into enchanted eloquence:

"Oh, my brethren, now you see the power of the spirit of Christ to
stir up all that is noblest and best in us!  You have heard the
testimony of our brother here, Brother Gantry, to the one and only
way to righteousness!  When you get home I want each and every one
of you to dig out the Old Book and turn to the Song of Solomon,
where it tells about the love of the Savior for the Church--turn to
the Song of Solomon, the fourth chapter and the tenth verse, where
it says--where Christ is talking about the church, and he says--
Song of Solomon, the fourth chapter, and the tenth verse--'How fair
is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than
wine!'

"Oh, the unspeakable joy of finding the joys of salvation!  You
have heard our brother's testimony.  We know of him as a man of
power, as a brother to all them that are oppressed, and now that he
has had his eyes opened and his ears unstopped, and he sees the
need of confession and of humble surrender before the throne--Oh,
this is a historic moment in the life of Hell-c--of Elmer Gantry!
Oh, Brother, be not afraid!  Come!  Step up here beside me, and
give testimony--"

"God!  We better get outa here quick!" panted Jim.

"Gee, yes!" Elmer groaned and they edged back through the crowd,
while Eddie Fislinger's piping pursued them like icy and
penetrating rain:

"Don't be afraid to acknowledge the leading of Jesus!  Are you boys
going to show yourselves too cowardly to risk the sneers of the
ungodly?"

They were safely out of the crowd, walking with severe countenances
and great rapidity back to the Old Home Sample Room.

"That was a dirty trick of Eddie's!" said Jim.  "God, it certainly
was!  Trying to convert me!  Right before those muckers!  If I ever
hear another yip out of Eddie, I'll knock his block off!  Nerve of
him, trying to lead ME up to any mourners' bench!  Fat chance!
I'll fix him!  Come on, show a little speed!" asserted the brother
to all them that were oppressed.

By the time for their late evening train, the sound conversation of
the bartender and the sound qualities of his Bourbon had caused
Elmer and Jim to forget Eddie Fislinger and the horrors of
undressing religion in public.  They were the more shocked, then,
swaying in their seat in the smoker, to see Eddie standing by them,
Bible in hand, backed by his two beaming partners in evangelism.

Eddie bared his teeth, smiled all over his watery eyes, and
caroled:

"Oh, fellows, you don't know how wonderful you were tonight!  But,
oh, boys, now you've taken the first step, why do you put it off--
why do you hesitate--why do you keep the Savior suffering as he
waits for you, longs for you?  He needs you boys, with your
splendid powers and intellects that we admire so--"

"This air," observed Jim Lefferts, "is getting too thick for me.  I
seem to smell a peculiar and a fishlike smell."  He slipped out of
the seat and marched toward the forward car.

Elmer sought to follow him, but Eddie had flopped into Jim's place
and was blithely squeaking on, while the other two hung over them
with tender Y.M.C.A. smiles very discomforting to Elmer's queasy
stomach as the train bumped on.

For all his brave words, Elmer had none of Jim's resolute contempt
for the church.  He was afraid of it.  It connoted his boyhood . . .
His mother, drained by early widowhood and drudgery, finding her
only emotion in hymns and the Bible, and weeping when he failed to
study his Sunday School lesson.  The church, full thirty dizzy feet
up to its curiously carven rafters, and the preachers, so
overwhelming in their wallowing voices, so terrifying in their
pictures of little boys who stole watermelons or indulged in
biological experiments behind barns.  The awe-oppressed moment of
his second conversion, at the age of eleven, when, weeping with
embarrassment and the prospect of losing so much fun, surrounded by
solemn and whiskered adult faces, he had signed a pledge binding
him to give up, forever, the joys of profanity, alcohol, cards,
dancing, and the theater.

These clouds hung behind and over him, for all his boldness.

Eddie Fislinger, the human being, he despised.  He considered him a
grasshopper, and with satisfaction considered stepping on him.  But
Eddie Fislinger, the gospeler, fortified with just such a pebble-
leather Bible (bookmarks of fringed silk and celluloid smirking
from the pages) as his Sunday School teachers had wielded when they
assured him that God was always creeping about to catch small boys
in their secret thoughts--this armored Eddie was an official, and
Elmer listened to him uneasily, never quite certain that he might
not yet find himself a dreadful person leading a pure a boresome
life in a clean frock coat.

"--and remember," Eddie was wailing, "how terribly dangerous it is
to put off the hour of salvation!  'Watch therefore for you know
not what hour your Lord doth come,' it says.  Suppose this train
were wrecked!  Tonight!"

The train ungraciously took that second to lurch on a curve.

"You see?  Where would you spend Eternity, Hell-cat?  Do you think
that any sportin' round is fun enough to burn in hell for?"

"Oh, cut it out.  I know all that stuff.  There's a lot of
arguments--You wait'll I get Jim to tell you what Bob Ingersoll
said about hell!"

"Yes!  Sure!  And you remember that on his deathbed Ingersoll
called his son to him and repented and begged his son to hurry and
be saved and burn all his wicked writings!"

"Well--Thunder--I don't feel like talking religion tonight.  Cut it
out."

But Eddie did feel like talking religion, very much so.  He waved
his Bible enthusiastically and found ever so many uncomfortable
texts.  Elmer listened as little as possible but he was too feeble
to make threats.

It was a golden relief when the train bumped to a stop at
Gritzmacher Springs.  The station was a greasy wooden box, the
platform was thick with slush, under the kerosene lights.  But Jim
was awaiting him, a refuge from confusing theological questions,
and with a furious "G'night!" to Eddie he staggered off.

"Why didn't you make him shut his trap?" demanded Jim.

"I did!  Whadja take a sneak for?  I told him to shut up and he
shut up and I snoozed all the way back and--Ow!  My head!  Don't
walk so fast!"



CHAPTER II


1


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 "Nicća":


     Holy, holy, holy! all the saints adore thee,
     Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.


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.


2


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.


3


With alarmed evangelistic zeal, Jim Lefferts struggled to keep
Elmer true to the faith, after his exposure to religion in
defending Eddie at Cato.

He was, on the whole, rather more zealous and fatiguing than Eddie.

Nights, when Elmer longed to go to sleep, Jim argued; mornings,
when Elmer should have been preparing his history, Jim read aloud
from Ingersoll and Thomas Paine.

"How you going to explain a thing like this--how you going to
explain it?" begged Jim.  "It says here in Deuteronomy that God
chased these Yids around in the desert for forty years and their
shoes didn't even wear out.  That's what it SAYS, right in the
Bible.  You believe a thing like that?  And do you believe that
Samson lost all his strength just because his gal cut off his hair?
Do you, eh?  Think hair had anything to do with his strength?"

Jim raced up and down the stuffy room, kicking at chairs, his
normally bland eyes feverish, his forefinger shaken in wrath, while
Elmer sat humped on the edge of the bed, his forehead in his hands,
rather enjoying having his soul fought for.

To prove that he was still a sound and freethinking stalwart, Elmer
went out with Jim one evening and at considerable effort, they
carried off a small outhouse and placed it on the steps of the
Administration Building.

Elmer almost forgot to worry after the affair of Eddie and Dr.
Lefferts.

Jim's father was a medical practitioner in an adjoining village.
He was a plump, bearded, bookish, merry man, very proud of his
atheism.  It was he who had trained Jim in the faith and in his
choice of liquor; he had sent Jim to this denominational college
partly because it was cheap and partly because it tickled his humor
to watch his son stir up the fretful complacency of the saints.  He
dropped in and found Elmer and Jim agitatedly awaiting the arrival
of Eddie.

"Eddie said," wailed Elmer, "he said he was coming up to see me,
and he'll haul out some more of these proofs that I'm going
straight to hell.  Gosh, Doctor, I don't know what's got into me.
You better examine me.  I must have anemics or something.  Why, one
time, if Eddie Fislinger had smiled at me, damn him, think of HIM
daring to smile at me!--if he'd said he was coming to my room, I'd
of told him, 'Like hell you will!' and I'd of kicked him in the
shins."

Dr. Lefferts purred in his beard.  His eyes were bright.

"I'll give your friend Fislinger a run for his money.  And for the
inconsequential sake of the non-existent Heaven, Jim, try not to
look surprised when you find your respectable father being pious."

When Eddie arrived, he was introduced to a silkily cordial Dr.
Lefferts, who shook his hand with that lengthiness and painfulness
common to politicians, salesmen, and the godly.  The doctor
rejoiced:

"Brother Fislinger, my boy here and Elmer tell me that you've been
trying to help them see the true Bible religion."

"I've been seeking to."

"It warms my soul to hear you say that, Brother Fislinger!  You
can't know what a grief it is to an old man tottering to the grave,
to one whose only solace now is prayer and Bible-reading"--Dr.
Lefferts had sat up till four a.m., three nights ago, playing poker
and discussing biology with his cronies, the probate judge and the
English stock-breeder--"what a grief it is to him that his only
son, James Blaine Lefferts, is not a believer.  But perhaps you can
do more than I can, Brother Fislinger.  They think I'm a fanatical
old fogy.  Now let me see--You're a real Bible believer?"

"Oh, yes!"  Eddie looked triumphantly at Jim, who was leaning
against the table, his hands in his pockets, as expressionless as
wood.  Elmer was curiously hunched up in the Morris chair, his
hands over his mouth.  The doctor said approvingly:

"That's splendid.  You believe every word of it, I hope, from cover
to cover?"

"Oh, yes.  What _I_ always say is, 'It's better to have the whole
Bible than a Bible full of holes.'"

"Why, that's a real thought, Brother Fislinger.  I must remember
that, to tell any of these alleged higher critics, if I ever meet
any!  'Bible whole--not Bible full of holes."  Oh, that's a fine
thought, and cleverly expressed.  You made it up?"

"Well, not exactly."

"I see, I see.  Well, that's splendid.  Now of course you believe
in the premillennial coming--I mean the real, authentic, genuwine,
immediate, bodily, premillennial coming of Jesus Christ?"

"Oh, yes, sure."

"And the virgin birth?"

"Oh, you bet."

"That's splendid!  Of course there are doctors who question whether
the virgin birth is quite in accordance with their experience of
obstetrics, but I tell those fellows, 'Look here!  How do I know
it's true?  Because it says so in the Bible, and if it weren't
true, do you suppose it would say so in the Bible?'  That certainly
shuts them up!  They have precious little to say after that!"

By this time a really beautiful, bounteous fellowship was flowing
between Eddie and the doctor, and they were looking with pity on
the embarrassed faces of the two heretics left out in the cold.
Dr. Lefferts tickled his beard and crooned:

"And of course, Brother Fislinger, you believe in infant
damnation."

Eddie explained, "No; that's not a Baptist doctrine."

"You--you--"  The good doctor choked, tugged at his collar, panted
and wailed:

"It's not a Baptist doctrine?  You don't believe in infant
damnation?"

"W-why, no--"

"Then God help the Baptist church and the Baptist doctrine!  God
help us all, in these unregenerate days, that we should be
contaminated by such infidelity!"  Eddie sweat, while the doctor
patted his plump hands and agonized:  "Look you here, my brother!
It's very simple.  Are we not saved by being washed in the blood of
the Lamb, and by that alone, by his blessed sacrifice alone?"

"W-why, yes, but--"

"Then either we ARE washed white, and saved, or else we are not
washed, and we are not saved!  That's the simple truth, and all
weakenings and explanations and hemming and hawing about this clear
and beautiful truth are simply of the devil, brother!  And at what
moment does a human being, in all his inevitable sinfulness, become
subject to baptism and salvation?  At two months?  At nine years?
At sixteen?  At forty-seven?  At ninety-nine?  No!  The moment he
is born!  And so if he be not baptized, then he must burn in hell
forever.  What does it say in the Good Book?  'For there is none
other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.'
It may seem a little hard of God to fry beautiful little babies,
but then think of the beautiful women whom he loves to roast there
for the edification of the saints!  Oh, brother, brother, now I
understand why Jimmy here, and poor Elmer, are lost to the faith!
It's because professed Christians like you give them this
emasculated religion!  Why, it's fellows like you who break down
the dike of true belief, and open a channel for higher criticism
and sabellianism and nymphomania and agnosticism and heresy and
Catholicism and Seventh-day Adventism and all those horrible German
inventions!  Once you begin to doubt, the wicked work is done!  Oh,
Jim, Elmer, I told you to listen to our friend here, but now that I
find him practically a free-thinker--"

The doctor staggered to a chair.  Eddie stood gaping.

It was the first time in his life that any one had accused him of
feebleness in the faith, of under-strictness.  He was smirkingly
accustomed to being denounced as over-strict.  He had almost as
much satisfaction out of denouncing liquor as other collegians had
out of drinking it.  He had, partly from his teachers and partly
right out of his own brain, any number of good answers to
classmates who protested that he was old-fashioned in belaboring
domino-playing, open communion, listening to waltz music, wearing a
gown in the pulpit, taking a walk on Sunday, reading novels, trans-
substantiation, and these new devices of the devil called moving-
pictures.  He could frighten almost any Laodicean.  But to be
called shaky himself, to be called heretic and slacker--for that
inconceivable attack he had no retort.

He looked at the agonized doctor, he looked at Jim and Elmer, who
were obviously distressed at his fall from spiritual leadership,
and he fled to secret prayer.

He took his grief presently to President Quarles, who explained
everything perfectly.

"But this doctor quoted Scripture to prove his point!" bleated
Eddie.

"Don't forget, Brother Fislinger, that 'the devil can quote
Scripture to his purpose.'"

Eddie thought that was a very nice thought and very nicely
expressed, and though he was not altogether sure that it was from
the Bible, he put it away for future use in sermons.  But before he
was sufficiently restored to go after Elmer again, Christmas
vacation had arrived.



When Eddie had gone, Elmer laughed far more heartily than Jim or
his father.  It is true that he hadn't quite understood what it was
all about.  Why, sure; Eddie had said it right; infant damnation
WASN'T a Baptist doctrine; it belonged to some of the Presbyterians,
and everybody knew the Presbyterians had a lot of funny beliefs.
But the doctor certainly had done something to squelch Eddie, and
Elmer felt safer than for many days.

He continued to feel safe up till Christmas vacation.  Then--

Some one, presumably Eddie, had informed Elmer's mother of his new
and promising Christian status.  He himself had been careful to
keep such compromising rumors out of his weekly letters home.
Through all the vacation he was conscious that his mother was
hovering closer to him than usual, that she was waiting to snatch
at his soul if he showed weakening.  Their home pastor, the
Reverend Mr. Aker--known in Paris as Reverend Aker--shook hands
with him at the church door with approval as incriminating as the
affection of his instructors at Terwillinger.

Unsupported by Jim, aware that at any moment Eddie might pop in
from his neighboring town and be accepted as an ally by Mrs.
Gantry, Elmer spent a vacation in which there was but little peace.
To keep his morale up, he gave particularly earnest attention to
bottle-pool and to the daughter of a nearby farmer.  But he was in
dread lest these be the last sad ashen days of his naturalness.

It seemed menacing that Eddie should be on the same train back to
college.  Eddie was with another exponent of piety, and he said
nothing to Elmer about the delights of hell, but he and his
companion secretly giggled with a confidence more than dismaying.

Jim Lefferts did not find in Elmer's face the conscious probity and
steadfastness which he had expected.



CHAPTER III


1


Early in January was the Annual College Y.M.C.A. Week of Prayer.
It was a countrywide event, but in Terwillinger College it was of
especial power that year because they were privileged to have with
them for three days none other than Judson Roberts, State Secretary
of the Y.M.C.A., and a man great personally as well as officially.

He was young, Mr. Roberts, only thirty-four, but already known
throughout the land.  He had always been known.  He had been a
member of a star University of Chicago football team, he had played
varsity baseball, he had been captain of the debating team, and at
the same time he had commanded the Y.M.C.A.  He had been known as
the Praying Fullback.  He still kept up his exercise--he was said
to have boxed privily with Jim Jefferies--and he had mightily
increased his praying.  A very friendly leader he was, and helpful;
hundreds of college men throughout Kansas called him "Old Jud."

Between prayer-meetings at Terwillinger, Judson Roberts sat in the
Bible History seminar-room, at a long table, under a bilious map of
the Holy Land, and had private conferences with the men students.
A surprising number of them came edging in, trembling, with averted
eyes, to ask advice about a secret practice, and Old Jud seemed
amazingly able to guess their trouble before they got going.

"Well, now, old boy, I'll tell you.  Terrible thing, all right, but
I've met quite a few cases, and you just want to buck up and take
it to the Lord in prayer.  Remember that he is able to help unto
the uttermost.  Now the first thing you want to do is to get rid
of--I'm afraid that you have some pretty nasty pictures and maybe a
juicy book hidden away, now haven't you, old boy?"

How could Old Jud have guessed?  What a corker!

"That's right.  I've got a swell plan, old boy.  Make a study of
missions, and think how clean and pure and manly you'd want to be
if you were going to carry the joys of Christianity to a lot of
poor gazebos that are under the evil spell of Buddhism and a lot of
these heathen religions.  Wouldn't you want to be able to look 'em
in the eye, and shame 'em?  Next thing to do is to get a lot of
exercise.  Get out and run like hell!  And then cold baths.  Darn'
cold.  There now!"  Rising, with ever so manly a handshake:  "Now,
skip along and remember"--with a tremendous and fetching and virile
laugh--"just run like hell!"

Jim and Elmer heard Old Jud in chapel.  He was tremendous.  He told
them a jolly joke about a man who kissed a girl, yet he rose to
feathered heights when he described the beatitude of real
ungrudging prayer, in which a man was big enough to be as a child.
He made them tearful over the gentleness with which he described
the Christchild, wandering lost by his parents, yet the next moment
he had them stretching with admiration as he arched his big
shoulder-muscles and observed that he would knock the block off any
sneering, sneaking, lying, beer-bloated bully who should dare to
come up to HIM in a meeting and try to throw a monkey-wrench into
the machinery by dragging out a lot of contemptible, quibbling,
atheistic, smart-aleck doubts!  (He really did, the young men
glowed, use the terms "knock the block off," and "throw a monkey-
wrench."  Oh, he was a lulu, a real red-blooded regular fellow!)

Jim was coming down with the grippe.  He was unable to pump up even
one good sneer.  He sat folded up, his chin near his knees, and
Elmer was allowed to swell with hero-worship.  Golly!  He'd thought
he had some muscle, but that guy Judson Roberts--zowie, he could
put Elmer on the mat seven falls out of five!  What a football
player he must have been!  Wee!

This Homeric worship he tried to explain to Jim, back in their
room, but Jim sneezed and went to bed.  The rude bard was left
without audience and he was practically glad when Eddie Fislinger
scratched at the door and edged in.

"Don't want to bother you fellows, but noticed you were at Old
Jud's meeting this afternoon and, say, you gotta come out and hear
him again tomorrow evening.  Big evening of the week.  Say, honest,
Hell-cat, don't you think Jud's a real humdinger?"

"Yes, I gotta admit, he's a dandy fellow."

"Say, he certainly is, isn't he!  He certainly is a dandy fellow,
isn't he!  Isn't he a peach!"

"Yes, he certainly is a peach--for a religious crank!"

"Aw now, Hell-cat, don't go calling him names!  You'll admit he
looks like some football shark."

"Yes, I guess he does, at that.  I'd liked to of played with him."

"Wouldn't you like to meet him?'"

"Well--"

At this moment of danger, Jim raised his dizzy head to protest,
"He's a holy strikebreaker!  One of these thick-necks that was born
husky and tries to make you think he made himself husky by prayer
and fasting.  I'd hate to take a chance on any poor little orphan
nip of Bourbon wandering into Old Jud's presence!  Yeh!  Chest-
pounder!  'Why can't you hundred-pound shrimps be a big manly
Christian like me!'"

Together they protested against this defilement of the hero, and
Eddie admitted that he had ventured to praise Elmer to Old Jud;
that Old Jud had seemed enthralled; that Old Jud was more than
likely--so friendly a Great Man was HE--to run in on Elmer this
afternoon.

Before Elmer could decide whether to be pleased or indignant,
before the enfeebled Jim could get up strength to decide for him,
the door was hit a mighty and heroic wallop, and in strode Judson
Roberts, big as a grizzly, jolly as a spaniel pup, radiant as ten
suns.

He set upon Elmer immediately.  He had six other doubting Thomases
or suspected smokers to dispose of before six o'clock.

He was a fair young giant with curly hair and a grin and with a
voice like the Bulls of Bashan whenever the strategy called for
manliness.  But with erring sisters, unless they were too erring,
he could be as lulling as woodland violets shaken in the perfumed
breeze.

"Hello, Hell-cat!" he boomed.  "Shake hands!"

Elmer had a playful custom of squeezing people's hands till they
cracked.  For the first time in his life his own paw felt limp and
burning.  He rubbed it and looked simple.

"Been hearing a lot about you, Hell-cat, and you, Jim.  Laid out,
Jim?  Want me to trot out and get a doc?"  Old Jud was sitting
easily on the edge of Jim's bed, and in the light of that grin,
even Jim Lefferts could not be very sour as he tried to sneer, "No,
thanks."

Roberts turned to Elmer again, and gloated:

"Well, old son, I've been hearing a lot about you.  Gee whillikins,
that must have been a great game you played against Thorvilsen
College!  They tell me when you hit that line, it gave like a
sponge, and when you tackled that big long Swede, he went down like
he'd been hit by lightning."

"Well, it was--it was a good game."

"Course I read about it at the time--"

"Did you, honest?"

"--and course I wanted to hear more about it, and meet you, Hell-
cat, so I been asking the boys about you, and say, they certainly
do give you a great hand!  Wish I could've had you with me on my
team at U of Chi--we needed a tackle like you."

Elmer basked.

"Yes, sir, the boys all been telling me what a dandy fine fellow
you are, and what a corking athlete, and what an A-1 gentleman.
They all say there's just one trouble with you, Elmer lad."

"Eh?"

"They say you're a coward."

"Heh?  WHO says I'm a coward?"

Judson Roberts swaggered across from the bed, stood with his hand
on Elmer's shoulder.  "They all say it, Hell-cat!  You see it takes
a sure-enough dyed-in-the-wool brave man to be big enough to give
Jesus a shot at him, and admit he's licked when he tries to fight
God!  It takes a man with guts to kneel down and admit his
worthlessness when all the world is jeering at him!  And you
haven't got that kind of courage, Elmer.  Oh, you think you're such
a big cuss--"

Old Jud swung him around; Old Jud's hand was crushing his shoulder.
"You think you're too husky, too good, to associate with the poor
little sniveling gospel-mongers, don't you!  You could knock out
any of 'em, couldn't you!  Well, I'm one of 'em.  Want to knock me
out?"

With one swift jerk Roberts had his coat off, stood with a striped
silk shirt revealing his hogshead torso.

"You bet, Hell-cat!  I'm willing to fight you for the glory of God!
God needs you!  Can you think of anything finer for a big husky
like you than to spend his life bringing poor, weak, sick, scared
folks to happiness?  Can't you see how the poor little skinny guys
and all the kiddies would follow you and praise you and admire you,
you old son of a gun?  Am I a sneaking Christian?  Can you lick me?
Want to fight it out?"

"No, gee, Mr. Roberts--"

"Judson, you big hunk of cheese, Old Jud!"

"No, gee, Judson, I guess you got me trimmed!  I pack a pretty good
wallop, but I'm not going to take any chance on you!"

"All right, old son.  Still think that all religious folks are
crabs?"

"No."

"And weaklings and pikers?"

"No."

"And liars?"

"Oh, no."

"All right, old boy.  Going to allow me to be a friend of yours, if
I don't butt in on your business?"

"Oh, gee, sure."

"Then there's just one favor I want to ask.  Will you come to our
big meeting tomorrow night?  You don't have to do a thing.  If you
think we're four-flushers--all right; that's your privilege.  Only
will you come and not decide we're all wrong beforehand, but really
use that big fine incisive brain of yours and study us as we are?
Will you come?"

"Oh, yes, sure, you bet."

"Fine, old boy.  Mighty proud to have you let me come butting in
here in this informal way.  Remember: if you honestly feel I'm
using any undue influence on the boys, you come right after me and
say so, and I'll be mighty proud of your trusting me to stand the
gaff.  So long, old Elm!  So long, Jim.  God bless you!"

"So long, Jud."

He was gone, a whirlwind that whisked the inconspicuous herb Eddie
Fislinger out after it.  And THEN Jim Lefferts spoke.

For a time after Judson Roberts' curtain, Elmer stood glowing,
tasting praise.  He was conscious of Jim's eyes on his back, and he
turned toward the bed, defiantly.

They stared, in a tug of war.  Elmer gave in with a furious:

"Well, then, why didn't you say something while he was here?"

"To him?  Talk to a curly wolf when he smells meat?  Besides, he's
intelligent, that fellow."

"Well, say, I'm glad to hear you say that, because--well, you see--
I'll explain how I feel."

"Oh, no, you won't, sweetheart!  You haven't got to the miracle-
pulling stage yet.  Sure he's intelligent.  I never heard a better
exhibition of bunco-steering in my life.  Sure!  He's just crazy to
have you come up and kick him in the ear and tell him you've
decided you can't give your imprimatur--"

"My WHAT?"

"--to his show, and he's to quit and go back to hod-carrying.
Sure.  He read all about your great game with Thorvilsen.  Sent off
to New York to get the Review of Reviews and read more about it.
Eddie Fislinger never told him a word.  He read about your tackling
in the London Times.  You bet.  Didn't he say so?  And he's a saved
soul--he couldn't lie.  And he just couldn't stand it if he didn't
become a friend of yours.  He can't know more than a couple of
thousand collidge boys to spring that stuff on! . . .  You bet I
believe in the old bearded Jew God!  Nobody but him could have made
all the idiots there are in the world!"

"Gee, Jim, honest, you don't understand Jud."

"No.  I don't.  When he could be a decent prize-fighter, and not
have to go around with angleworms like Eddie Fislinger day after
day!"

And thus till midnight, for all Jim's fevers.

But Elmer was at Judson Roberts' meeting next evening, unprotected
by Jim, who remained at home in so vile a temper that Elmer had
sent in a doctor and sneaked away from the room for the afternoon.


2


It was undoubtedly Eddie who wrote or telegraphed to Mrs. Gantry
that she would do well to be present at the meeting.  Paris was
only forty miles from Gritzmacher Springs.

Elmer crept into his room at six, still wistfully hoping to have
Jim's sanction, still ready to insist that if he went to the
meeting he would be in no danger of conversion.  He had walked
miles through the slush, worrying.  He was ready now to give up the
meeting, to give up Judson's friendship, if Jim should insist.

As he wavered in, Mrs. Gantry stood by Jim's lightning-shot bed.

"Why, Ma!  What you doing here?  What's gone wrong?" Elmer panted.

It was impossible to think of her taking a journey for anything
less than a funeral.

Cozily, "Can't I run up and see my two boys if I want to, Elmy?  I
declare, I believe you'd of killed Jim, with all this nasty tobacco
air, if I hadn't come in and aired the place out.  I THOUGHT, Elmer
Gantry, you weren't supposed to smoke in Terwillinger!  By the
rules of the college!  I thought, young man, that you lived up to
'em!  But never mind."

Uneasily--for Jim had never before seen him demoted to childhood,
as he always was in his mother's presence--Elmer grumbled, "But
honest, Ma, what did you come up for?"

"Well, I read about what a nice week of prayer you were going to
have, and I thought I'd just like to hear a real big bug preach.
I've got a vacation coming, too!  Now don't you worry one mite
about me.  I guess I can take care of myself after all these years!
The first traveling I ever done with you, young man--the time I
went to Cousin Adeline's wedding--I just tucked you under one arm--
and how you squalled, the whole way!--mercy, you liked to hear the
sound of your own voice then just like you do now!--and I tucked my
old valise under the other, and off I went!  Don't you worry one
mite about me.  I'm only going to stay over the night--got a sale
on remnants starting--going back on Number Seven tomorrow.  I left
my valise at that boarding-house right across from the depot.  But
there's one thing you might do if 'tain't too much trouble, Elmy.
You know I've only been up here at the college once before.  I'd
feel kind of funny, country bumpkin like me, going alone to that
big meeting, with all those smart professors and everybody there,
and I'd be glad if you could come along."

"Of course he'll go, Mrs. Gantry," said Jim.

But before Elmer was carried away, Jim had the chance to whisper,
"God, do be careful!  Remember I won't be there to protect you!
Don't let 'em pick on you!  Don't do one single doggone thing they
want you to do, and then maybe you'll be safe!"

As he went out, Elmer looked back at Jim.  He was shakily sitting
up in bed, his eyes imploring.


3


The climactic meeting of the Annual Prayer Week, to be addressed by
President Quarles, four ministers, and a rich trustee who was in
the pearl-button business, with Judson Roberts as star soloist, was
not held at the Y.M.C.A. but at the largest auditorium in town, the
Baptist Church, with hundreds of town-people joining the
collegians.

The church was a welter of brownstone, with Moorish arches and an
immense star-shaped window not yet filled with stained glass.

Elmer hoped to be late enough to creep in inconspicuously, but as
his mother and he straggled up to the Romanesque portico, students
were still outside, chattering.  He was certain they were
whispering, "There he is--Hell-cat Gantry.  Say, is it really true
he's under conviction of sin?  I thought he cussed out the church
more'n anybody in college."

Meek though Elmer had been under instruction by Jim and threats by
Eddie and yearning by his mother, he was not normally given to
humility, and he looked at his critics defiantly.  "I'll show 'em!
If they think I'm going to sneak in--"

He swaggered down almost to the front pews, to the joy of his
mother, who had been afraid that as usual he would hide in the
rear, handy to the door if the preacher should become personal.

There was a great deal of decoration in the church, which had been
endowed by a zealous alumnus after making his strike in Alaskan
boarding-houses during the gold-rush.  There were Egyptian pillars
with gilded capitals, on the ceiling were gilt stars and clouds
more woolen than woolly, and the walls were painted cheerily in
three strata--green, watery blue, and khaki.  It was an echoing and
gaping church, and presently it was packed, the aisles full.
Professors with string mustaches and dog-eared Bibles, men students
in sweaters or flannel shirts, earnest young women students in
homemade muslin with modest ribbons, over-smiling old maids of the
town, venerable saints from the back-country with beards which
partly hid the fact that they wore collars without ties, old women
with billowing shoulders, irritated young married couples with
broods of babies who crawled, slid, bellowed, and stared with
embarrassing wonder at bachelors.

Five minutes later Elmer would not have had a seat down front.  Now
he could not escape.  He was packed in between his mother and a
wheezing fat man, and in the aisle beside his pew stood evangelical
tailors and ardent school-teachers.

The congregation swung into "When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder" and
Elmer gave up his frenzied but impractical plans for escape.  His
mother nestled happily beside him, her hand proudly touching his
sleeve, and he was stirred by the march and battle of the hymn:


When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound, and time shall be no more,
And the morning breaks eternal, bright and far.--


They stood for the singing of "Shall We Gather at the River?"
Elmer inarticulately began to feel his community with these humble,
aspiring people--his own prairie tribe: this gaunt carpenter, a
good fellow, full of friendly greetings; this farm-wife, so
courageous, channeled by pioneer labor; this classmate, an
admirable basket-ball player, yet now chanting beatifically, his
head back, his eyes closed, his voice ringing.  Elmer's own people.
Could he be a traitor to them, could he resist the current of their
united belief and longing?


     Yes, we'll gather at the river,
     The beautiful, the beautiful river,
     Gather with the saints at the river
     That flows by the throne of God.


Could he endure it to be away from them, in the chill void of Jim
Lefferts' rationalizing, on that day when they should be rejoicing
in the warm morning sunshine by the river rolling to the
imperishable Throne?

And his voice--he had merely muttered the words of the first hymn--
boomed out ungrudgingly:


     Soon our pilgrimage will cease;
     Soon our happy hearts will quiver
     With the melody of peace.


His mother stroked his sleeve.  He remembered that she had
maintained he was the best singer she had ever heard; that Jim
Lefferts had admitted, "You certainly can make that hymn dope sound
as if it meant something."  He noted that people near by looked
about with pleasure when they heard his Big Ben dominate the
cracked jangling.

The preliminaries merely warmed up the audience for Judson Roberts.
Old Jud was in form.  He laughed, he shouted, he knelt and wept
with real tears, he loved everybody, he raced down into the
audience and patted shoulders, and for the moment everybody felt
that he was closer to them than their closest friends.

"Rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race," was his text.

Roberts was really a competent athlete, and he really had skill in
evoking pictures.  He described the Chicago-Michigan game, and
Elmer was lost in him, with him lived the moments of the scrimmage,
the long run with the ball, the bleachers rising to him.

Roberts voice softened.  He was pleading.  He was not talking, he
said, to weak men who needed coddling into the Kingdom, but to
strong men, to rejoicing men, to men brave in armor.  There was
another sort of race more exhilarating than any game, and it led
not merely to a score on a big board but to the making of a new
world--it led not to newspaper paragraphs but to glory eternal.
Dangerous--calling for strong men!  Ecstatic--brimming with
thrills!  The team captained by Christ!  No timid Jesus did he
preach, but the adventurer who had joyed to associate with common
men, with reckless fishermen, with captains and rulers, who had
dared to face the soldiers in the garden, who had dared the
myrmidons of Rome and death itself!  Come!  Who was gallant?  Who
had nerve?  Who longed to live abundantly?  Let them come!

They must confess their sins, they must repent, they must know
their own weakness save as they were reborn in Christ.  But they
must confess not in heaven-pilfering weakness, but in training for
the battle under the wind-torn banners of the Mighty Captain.  Who
would come?  Who would come?  Who was for vision and the great
adventure?

He was among them, Judson Roberts, with his arms held out, his
voice a bugle.  Young men sobbed and knelt; a woman shrieked;
people were elbowing the standers in the aisles and pushing forward
to kneel in agonized happiness, and suddenly they were setting
relentlessly on a bewildered Elmer Gantry, who had been betrayed
into forgetting himself, into longing to be one with Judson
Roberts.

His mother was wringing his hand, begging, "Oh, won't you come?
Won't you make your old mother happy?  Let yourself know the joy of
surrender to Jesus!"  She was weeping, old eyes puckered, and in
her weeping was his every recollection of winter dawns when she had
let him stay in bed and brought porridge to him across the icy
floor; winter evenings when he had awakened to find her still
stitching; and that confusing intimidating hour, in the abyss of
his first memories, when he had seen her shaken beside a coffin
that contained a cold monster in the shape of his father.

The basket-ball player was patting his other arm, begging, "Dear
old Hell-cat, you've never let yourself be happy!  You've been
lonely!  Let yourself be happy with us!  You know I'm no
mollycoddle.  Won't you know the happiness of salvation with us?"

A thread-thin old man, very dignified, a man with secret eyes that
had known battles, and mountain-valleys, was holding out his hands
to Elmer, imploring with a humility utterly disconcerting, "Oh,
come, come with us--don't stand there making Jesus beg and beg--
don't leave the Christ that died for us standing out in the cold,
begging!"

And, somehow, flashing through the crowd, Judson Roberts was with
Elmer, honoring him beyond all the multitude, appealing for his
friendship--Judson Roberts the gorgeous, beseeching:

"Are you going to hurt me, Elmer?  Are you going to let me go away
miserable and beaten, old man?  Are you going to betray me like
Judas, when I've offered you my Jesus as the most precious gift I
can bring you?  Are you going to slap me and defile me and hurt me?
Come!  Think of the joy of being rid of all those nasty little sins
that you've felt so ashamed of!  Won't you come kneel with me,
won't you?"

His mother shrieked, "Won't you, Elmer?  With him and me?  Won't
you make us happy?  Won't you be big enough to not be afraid?  See
how we're all longing for you, praying for you!"

"Yes!" from around him, from strangers; and "Help ME to follow you,
Brother--I'll go if you will!"  Voices woven, thick, dove-white and
terrifying black of mourning and lightning-colored, flung around
him, binding him--His mother's pleading, Judson Roberts' tribute--

An instant he saw Jim Lefferts, and heard him insist:  "Why, sure,
course they believe it.  They hypnotize themselves.  But don't let
'em hypnotize you!"

He saw Jim's eyes, that for him alone veiled their bright harshness
and became lonely, asking for comradeship.  He struggled; with all
the blubbering confusion of a small boy set on by his elders,
frightened and overwhelmed, he longed to be honest, to be true to
Jim--to be true to himself and his own good honest sins and
whatsoever penalties they might carry.  Then the visions were
driven away by voices that closed over him like surf above an
exhausted swimmer.  Volitionless, marveling at the sight of himself
as a pinioned giant, he was being urged forward, forced forward,
his mother on one arm and Judson on the other, a rhapsodic mob
following.

Bewildered.  Miserable. . . .  False to Jim.

But as he came to the row kneeling in front of the first pew, he
had a thought that made everything all right.  Yes!  He could have
both!  He could keep Judson and his mother, yet retain Jim's
respect.  He had only to bring Jim also to Jesus, then all of them
would be together in beatitude!

Freed from misery by that revelation, he knelt, and suddenly his
voice was noisy in confession, while the shouts of the audience,
the ejaculations of Judson and his mother, exalted him to hot self-
approval and made it seem splendidly right to yield to the mystic
fervor.

He had but little to do with what he said.  The willing was not his
but the mob's; the phrases were not his but those of the emotional
preachers and hysterical worshipers whom he had heard since
babyhood:

"O God, oh, I have sinned!  My sins are heavy on me!  I am unworthy
of compassion!  O Jesus, intercede for me!  Oh, let thy blood that
was shed for me be my salvation!  O God, I do truly repent of my
great sinning and I do long for the everlasting peace of thy
bosom!"

"Oh, praise God," from the multitude, and "Praise his holy name!
Thank God, thank God, thank God!  Oh, hallelujah, Brother, thank
the dear loving God!"

He was certain that he would never again want to guzzle, to follow
loose women, to blaspheme; he knew the rapture of salvation--yes,
and of being the center of interest in the crowd.

Others about him were beating their foreheads, others were
shrieking, "Lord, be merciful," and one woman--he remembered her as
a strange, repressed, mad-eyed special student who was not known to
have any friends--was stretched out, oblivious of the crowd,
jerking, her limbs twitching, her hands clenched, panting
rhythmically.

But it was Elmer, tallest of the converts, tall as Judson Roberts,
whom all the students and most of the townpeople found important,
who found himself important.

His mother was crying, "Oh, this is the happiest hour of my life,
dear!  This makes up for everything!"

To be able to give her such delight!

Judson was clawing Elmer's hand, whooping, "Liked to had you on the
team at Chicago, but I'm a lot gladder to have you with me on
Christ's team!  If you knew how proud I am!"

To be thus linked forever with Judson!

Elmer's embarrassment was gliding into a robust self-satisfaction.

Then the others were crowding on him, shaking his hand,
congratulating him: the football center, the Latin professor, the
town grocer.  President Quarles, his chin whisker vibrant and his
shaven upper lip wiggling from side to side, was insisting, "Come,
Brother Elmer, stand up on the platform and say a few words to us--
you must--we all need it--we're thrilled by your splendid example!"

Elmer was not quite sure how he got through the converts, up the
steps to the platform.  He suspected afterward that Judson Roberts
had done a good deal of trained pushing.

He looked down, something of his panic returning.  But they were
sobbing with affection for him.  The Elmer Gantry who had for years
pretended that he relished defying the whole college had for those
same years desired popularity.  He had it now--popularity, almost
love, almost reverence, and he felt overpoweringly his rôle as
leading man.

He was stirred to more flamboyant confession:

"Oh, for the first time I know the peace of God!  Nothing I have
ever done has been right, because it didn't lead to the way and the
truth!  Here I thought I was a good church-member, but all the time
I hadn't seen the real light.  I'd never been willing to kneel down
and confess myself a miserable sinner.  But I'm kneeling now, and,
oh, the blessedness of humility!"

He wasn't, to be quite accurate, kneeling at all; he was standing
up, very tall and broad, waving his hands; and though what he was
experiencing may have been the blessedness of humility, it sounded
like his announcements of an ability to lick anybody in any given
saloon.  But he was greeted with flaming hallelujahs, and he
shouted on till he was rapturous and very sweaty:

"Come!  Come to him now!  Oh, it's funny that I who've been so
great a sinner could dare to give you his invitation, but he's
almighty and shall prevail, and he giveth his sweet tidings through
the mouths of babes and sucklings and the most unworthy, and lo,
the strong shall be confounded and the weak exalted in his sight!"

It was all, the Mithraic phrasing, as familiar as "Good morning" or
"How are you?" to the audience, yet he must have put new violence
into it, for instead of smiling at the recency of his ardor they
looked at him gravely, and suddenly a miracle was beheld.

Ten minutes after his own experience, Elmer made his first
conversion.

A pimply youth, long known as a pool-room tout, leaped up, his
greasy face working, shrieked, "O God, forgive me!" butted in
frenzy through the crowd, ran to the mourner's bench, lay with his
mouth frothing in convulsion.

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


     Draw me nearer, blessed Lord,
     To thy precious bleeding side.


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.


4


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."


5


When President Quarles called for him, Elmer's exhortation was
outlined, and he had changed to his Sunday-best blue serge double-
breasted suit and sleeked his hair.

As they departed, Jim called Elmer back from the hall to whisper,
"Say, Hell-cat, you won't forget to give credit to Ingersoll, and
to me for tipping you off, will you?"

"You go to hell!" said Elmer.


6


There was a sizable and extremely curious gathering at the Y.M.C.A.
All day the campus had debated, "Did Hell-cat really sure-enough
get saved?  Is he going to cut out his hell-raising?"

Every man he knew was present, their gaping mouths dripping
question-marks, grinning or doubtful.  Their leers confused him,
and he was angry at being introduced by Eddie Fislinger, president
of the Y.M.C.A.

He started coldly, stammering.  But Ingersoll had provided the
beginning of his discourse, and he warmed to the splendor of his
own voice.  He saw the audience in the curving Y.M.C.A. auditorium
as a radiant cloud, and he began to boom confidently, he began to
add to his outline impressive ideas which were altogether his own--
except, perhaps, as he had heard them thirty or forty times in
sermons.

It sounded very well, considering.  Certainly it compared well with
the average mystical rhapsody of the pulpit.

For all his slang, his cursing, his mauled plurals and singulars,
Elmer had been compelled in college to read certain books, to hear
certain lectures, all filled with flushed, florid polysyllables,
with juicy sentiments about God, sunsets, the moral improvement
inherent in a daily view of mountain scenery, angels, fishing for
souls, fishing for fish, ideals, patriotism, democracy, purity, the
error of Providence in creating the female leg, courage, humility,
justice, the agricultural methods of Palestine circ. 4 A.D., the
beauty of domesticity, and preachers' salaries.  These blossoming
words, these organ-like phrases, these profound notions had been
rammed home till they stuck in his brain, ready for use.

But even to the schoolboy-wearied faculty who had done the ramming,
who ought to have seen the sources, it was still astonishing that
after four years of grunting, Elmer Gantry should come out with
these flourishes, which they took perfectly seriously, for they
themselves had been nurtured in minute Baptist and Campbellite
colleges.

Not one of them considered that there could be anything comic in
the spectacle of a large young man, divinely fitted for coal-
heaving, standing up and wallowing in thick slippery words about
Love and the Soul.  They sat--young instructors not long from the
farm, professors pale from years of napping in unaired pastoral
studies--and looked at Elmer respectfully as he throbbed:

"It's awful' hard for a fellow that's more used to bucking the line
than to talking publicly to express how he means, but sometimes I
guess maybe you think about a lot of things even if you don't
always express how you mean, and I want to--what I want to talk
about is how if a fellow looks down deep into things and is really
square with God, and lets God fill his heart with higher
aspirations, he sees that--he sees that Love is the one thing that
can really sure-enough lighten all of life's dark clouds.

"Yes, sir, just Love!  It's the morning and evening star.  It's--
even in the quiet tomb, I mean those that are around the quiet
tomb, you find it even there.  What is it that inspires all great
men, all poets and patriots and philosophers?  It's Love, isn't it?
What gave the world its first evidences of immortality?  Love!  It
fills the world with melody, for what is music?  What is music?
Why!  MUSIC IS THE VOICE OF LOVE!"

The great President Quarles leaned back and put on his spectacles,
which gave a slight appearance of learning to his chin-whiskered
countenance, otherwise that of a small-town banker in 1850.  He was
the center of a row of a dozen initiates on the platform of the
Y.M.C.A. auditorium, a shallow platform under a plaster half-dome.
The wall behind them was thick with diagrams, rather like
anatomical charts, showing the winning of souls in Egypt, the
amount spent on whisky versus the amount spent on hymn-books, and
the illustrated progress of a pilgrim from Unclean Speech through
Cigarette smoking and Beer Saloons to a lively situation in which
he beat his wife, who seemed to dislike it.  Above was a large and
enlightening motto:  "Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil
with good."

The whole place had that damp-straw odor characteristic of places
of worship, but President Quarles did not, seemingly, suffer in it.
All his life he had lived in tabernacles and in rooms devoted to
thin church periodicals and thick volumes of sermons.  He had a
slight constant snuffle, but his organism was apparently adapted
now to existing without air.  He beamed and rubbed his hands, and
looked with devout joy on Elmer's broad back as Elmer snapped into
it, ever surer of himself; as he bellowed at the audience--beating
them, breaking through their interference, making a touchdown:

"What is it makes us different from the animals?  The passion of
Love!  Without it, we are--in fact we are nothing; with it, earth
is heaven, and we are, I mean to some extent, like God himself!
Now that's what I wanted to explain about Love, and here's how it
applies.  Prob'ly there's a whole lot of you like myself--oh, I
been doing it, I'm not going to spare myself--I been going along
thinking I was too good, too big, too smart, for the divine love of
the Savior!  Say!  Any of you ever stop and think how much you're
handing yourself when you figure you can get along without divine
intercession?  Say!  I suppose prob'ly you're bigger than Moses,
bigger than St. Paul, bigger than Pastewer, that great scientist--"

President Quarles was exulting, "It was a genuine conversion!  But
more than that!  Here's a true discovery--my discovery!  Elmer is a
born preacher, once he lets himself go, and I can make him do it!
O Lord, how mysterious are thy ways!  Thou hast chosen to train our
young brother not so much in prayer as in the mighty struggles of
the Olympic field!  I--thou, Lord, hast produced a born preacher.
Some day he'll be one of our leading prophets!"

The audience clapped when Elmer hammered out his conclusion:  "--
and you Freshmen will save a lot of time that I wasted if you see
right now that until you know God you know--just nothing!"

They clapped, they made their faces to shine upon him.  Eddie
Fislinger won him by sighing, "Old fellow, you got me beat at my
own game like you have at your game!"  There was much hand-shaking.
None of it was more ardent than that of his recent enemy, the Latin
professor, who breathed:

"Where did you get all those fine ideas and metaphors about the
Divine Love, Gantry?"

"Oh," modestly, "I can't hardly call them mine, Professor.  I guess
I just got them by praying."


7


Judson Roberts, ex-football-star, state secretary of the Y.M.C.A.,
was on the train to Concordia, Kansas.  In the vestibule he had
three puffs of an illegal cigarette and crushed it out.

"No, really, it wasn't so bad for him, that Elmer what's-his-name,
to get converted.  Suppose there ISN'T anything to it.  Won't hurt
him to cut out some of his bad habits for a while, anyway.  And how
do we know?  Maybe the Holy Ghost does come down.  No more
improbable than electricity.  I do wish I could get over this
doubting!  I forget it when I've got 'em going in an evangelistic
meeting, but when I watch a big butcher like him, with that damn'
silly smirk on his jowls--I believe I'll go into the real estate
business.  I don't think I'm hurting these young fellows any, but I
do wish I could be honest.  Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy, I wish I had a
good job selling real estate!"


8


Elmer walked home firmly.  "Just what right has Mr. James B.
Lefferts got to tell me I mustn't use my ability to get a crowd
going?  And I certainly had 'em going!  Never knew I could spiel
like that.  Easy as feetball!  And Prexy saying I was a born
preacher!  Huh!"

Firmly and resentfully he came into their room, and slammed down
his hat.

It awoke Jim.  "How'd it go over?  Hand 'em out the gospel guff?"

"I did!" Elmer trumpeted.  "It went over, as you put it, corking.
Got any objections?"

He lighted the largest lamp and turned it up full, his back to Jim.

No answer.  When he looked about, Jim seemed asleep.

At seven next morning he said forgivingly, rather patronizingly,
"I'll be gone till ten--bring you back some breakfast?"

Jim answered, "No, thanks," and those were his only words that
morning.

When Elmer came in at ten-thirty, Jim was gone, his possessions
gone.  (It was no great moving: three suitcases of clothes, an
armful of books.)  There was a note on the table:


I shall live at the College Inn the rest of this year.  You can
probably get Eddie Fislinger to l