I
NOT till December did Sharon Falconer take Elmer on as assistant.
When she discharged Cecil Aylston, he said, in a small cold voice, “This
is the last time, my dear prophet and peddler, that I shall ever try to
be decent.” But it is known that for several months he tried to conduct
a rescue mission in Buffalo, and if he was examined for insanity, it was
because he was seen to sit for hours staring. He was killed in a
gambling den in Juarez, and when she heard of it Sharon was very
sorry—she spoke of going to fetch his body, but she was too busy with
holy work.
Elmer joined her at the beginning of the meetings in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
He opened the meetings for her, made announcements, offered prayer,
preached when she was too weary, and led the singing when Adelbert
Shoop, the musical director, was indisposed. He developed a dozen sound
sermons out of encyclopedias of exegesis, handbooks for evangelists, and
manuals of sermon outlines. He had a powerful discourse, used in the For
Men Only service, on the strength and joy of complete chastity; he told
how Jim Leffingwell saw the folly of pleasure at the death-bed of his
daughter; and he had an uplifting address, suitable to all occasions, on
Love as the Morning and the Evening Star.
He helped Sharon where Cecil had held her back—or so she said. While
she kept her vocabulary of poetic terms, Elmer encouraged her in just
the soap-box denunciation of sin which had made Cecil shudder. Also he
spoke of Cecil as “Osric,” which she found very funny indeed, and as
“Percy,” and “Algernon.” He urged her to tackle the biggest towns, the
most polite or rowdy audiences, and to advertise herself not in the
wet-kitten high-church phrases approved by Cecil but in a manner
befitting a circus, an Elks’ convention, or a new messiah.
Under Elmer’s urging she ventured for the first time into the larger
cities. She descended on Minneapolis and, with the support only of such
sects as the Full Gospel Assembly, the Nazarenes, the Church of God, and
the Wesleyan Methodists, she risked her savings in hiring an armory and
inserting two-column six-inch advertisements of herself.
Minneapolis was quite as enlivened as smaller places by Sharon’s voice
and eyes, by her Grecian robes, by her gold-and-white pyramidal altar,
and the profits were gratifying. Thereafter she sandwiched Indianapolis,
Rochester, Atlanta, Seattle, the two Portlands, Pittsburgh, in between
smaller cities.
For two years life was a whirlwind to Elmer Gantry.
It was so frantic that he could never remember which town was which.
Everything was a blur of hot sermons, writhing converts, appeals for
contributions, trains, denunciation of lazy personal workers,
denunciations of Adelbert Shoop for getting drunk, firing of Adelbert
Shoop, taking back of Adelbert Shoop when no other tenor so unctuously
pious was to be found.
Of one duty he was never weary: of standing around and being impressive
and very male for the benefit of lady seekers. How tenderly he would
take their hands and moan, “Won’t you hear the dear Savior’s voice
calling, Sister?” and all of them, spinsters with pathetic dried
girlishness, misunderstood wives, held fast to his hand and were added
to the carefully kept total of saved souls. Sharon saw to it that he
dressed the part—double-breasted dark blue with a dashing tie in
winter, and in summer white suits with white shoes.
But however loudly the skirts rustled about him, so great was Sharon’s
intimidating charm that he was true to her.
If he was a dervish figure those two years, she was a shooting star;
inspired in her preaching, passionate with him, then a naughty child who
laughed and refused to be serious even at the sermon hour; gallantly
generous, then a tight-fisted virago squabbling over ten cents for
stamps. Always, in every high-colored mood, she was his religion and his
reason for being.
II
When she attacked the larger towns and asked for the support of the
richer churches, Sharon had to create several new methods in the trade
of evangelism. The churches were suspicious of women evangelists—women
might do very well in visiting the sick, knitting for the heathen, and
giving strawberry festivals, but they couldn’t shout loud enough to
scare the devil out of sinners. Indeed all evangelists, men and women,
were under attack. Sound churchmen here and there were asking whether
there was any peculiar spiritual value in frightening people into
groveling maniacs. They were publishing statistics which asserted that
not ten per cent. of the converts at emotional revival meetings remained
church-members. They were even so commercial as to inquire why a pastor
with a salary of two thousand dollars a year—when he got it—should
agonize over helping an evangelist to make ten thousand, forty thousand.
All these doubters had to be answered. Elmer persuaded Sharon to
discharge her former advance-agent—he had been a minister and
contributor to the religious press, till the unfortunate affair of the
oil stock—and hire a real press-agent, trained in newspaper work,
circus advertising, and real estate promoting. It was Elmer and the
press-agent who worked up the new technique of risky but impressive
defiance.
Where the former advance-man had begged the ministers and wealthy laymen
of a town to which Sharon wanted to be invited to appreciate her
spirituality, and had sat nervously about hotels, the new salesman of
salvation was brusque:
“I can’t waste my time and the Lord’s time waiting for you people to
make up your minds. Sister Falconer is especially interested in this
city because she has been informed that there is a subterranean
quickening here such as would simply jam your churches, with a grand new
outpouring of the spirit, provided some real expert like her came to set
the fuse alight. But there are so many other towns begging for her
services that if you can’t make up your minds immediately, we’ll have to
accept their appeals and pass you up. Sorry. Can only wait till
midnight. Tonight. Reserved my Pullman already.”
There were ever so many ecclesiastical bodies who answered that they
didn’t see why he waited even till midnight, but if they were thus
intimidated into signing the contract (an excellent contract, drawn up
by a devout Christian Scientist lawyer named Finkelstein) they were the
more prepared to give spiritual and financial support to Sharon’s labors
when she did arrive.
The new press-agent was finally so impressed by the beauties of
evangelism, as contrasted with his former circuses and real estate, that
he was himself converted, and sometimes when he was in town with the
troupe, he sang in the choir and spoke to Y. M. C. A. classes in
journalism. But even Elmer’s arguments could never get him to give up a
sturdy, plodding devotion to poker.
III
The contract signed, the advance-man remembered his former newspaper
labors, and for a few days became touchingly friendly with all the
reporters in town. There were late parties at his hotel; there was much
sending of bell-boys for more bottles of Wilson and White Horse and
Green River. The press-agent admitted that he really did think that Miss
Falconer was the greatest woman since Sarah Bernhardt, and he let the
boys have stories, guaranteed held exclusive, of her beauty, the glories
of her family, her miraculous power of fetching sinners or rain by
prayer, and the rather vaguely dated time when, as a young girl, she had
been recognized by Dwight Moody as his successor.
South of the Mason and Dixon line her grandfather was merely Mr.
Falconer, a bellicose and pious man, but far enough north he was General
Falconer of Ole Virginny—preferably spelled that way—who had been the
adviser and solace of General Robert E. Lee. The press-agent also wrote
the posters for the Ministerial Alliance, giving Satan a generous
warning as to what was to happen to him.
So when Sharon and the troupe arrived, the newspapers were eager, the
walls and shop-windows were scarlet with placards, and the town was
breathless. Sometimes a thousand people gathered at the station for her
arrival.
There were always a few infidels, particularly among the reporters, who
had doubted her talents, but when they saw her in the train vestibule,
in a long white coat, when she had stood there a second with her eyes
closed, lost in prayer for this new community, when slowly she held out
her white nervous hands in greeting—then the advance-agent’s work was
two-thirds done here and he could go on to whiten new fields for the
harvest.
But there was still plenty of discussion before Sharon was rid of the
forces of selfishness and able to get down to the job of spreading
light.
Local committees were always stubborn, local committees were always
jealous, local committees were always lazy, and local committees were
always told these facts, with vigor. The heart of the arguments was
money.
Sharon was one of the first evangelists to depend for all her profit not
on a share of the contributions nor on a weekly offering but on one
night devoted entirely to a voluntary “thank offering” for her and her
crew alone. It sounded unselfish and it brought in more; every devotee
saved up for that occasion; and it proved easier to get one fifty-dollar
donation than a dozen of a dollar each. But to work up this lone
offering to suitably thankful proportions, a great deal of loving and
efficient preparation was needed—reminders given by the chief pastors,
bankers, and other holy persons of the town, the distribution of
envelopes over which devotees were supposed to brood for the whole six
weeks of the meetings, and innumerable newspaper paragraphs about the
self-sacrifice and heavy expenses of the evangelists.
It was over these innocent necessary precautions that the local
committees always showed their meanness. They liked giving over only one
contribution to the evangelist, but they wanted nothing said about it
till they themselves had been taken care of—till the rent of the hall
or the cost of building a tabernacle, the heat, the lights, the
advertising, and other expenses had been paid.
Sharon would meet the committee—a score of clergymen, a score of their
most respectable deacons, a few angular Sunday School superintendents, a
few disapproving wives—in a church parlor, and for the occasion she
always wore the gray suit and an air of metropolitan firmness, and swung
a pair of pince-nez with lenses made of window-glass. While in familiar
words the local chairman was explaining to her that their expenses were
heavy, she would smile as though she knew something they could not
guess, then let fly at them breathlessly:
“I’m afraid there is some error here! I wonder if you are quite in the
mood to forget all material things and really throw yourselves into the
self-abnegating glory of a hot campaign for souls? I know all you have
to say—as a matter of fact, you’ve forgotten to mention your expenses
for watchmen, extra hymn books, and hiring camp-chairs!
“But you haven’t the experience to appreciate _my_ expenses! I have to
maintain almost as great a staff—not only workers and musicians but all
my other representatives, whom you never see—as though I had a factory.
Besides them, I have my charities. There is, for example, the Old
Ladies’ Home, which I keep up entirely—oh, I shan’t say anything about
it, but if you could see those poor aged women turning to me with such
anxious faces—!”
(Where that Old Ladies’ Home was, Elmer never learned.)
“We come here without any guarantee; we depend wholly upon the free-will
offering of the last day; and I’m afraid you’re going to stress the
local expenses so that people will not feel like giving on the last day
even enough to pay the salaries of my assistants. I’m taking—if it were
not that I abominate the pitiful and character-destroying vice of
gambling, I’d say that I’m taking such a terrible gamble that it
frightens me! But there it is, and—”
While she was talking, Sharon was sizing up this new assortment of
clergy: the cranks, the testy male old maids, the advertising and
pushing demagogues, the commonplace pulpit-job-holders, the straddling
young liberals; the real mystics, the kindly fathers of their flocks,
the lovers of righteousness. She had picked out as her advocate the most
sympathetic, and she launched her peroration straight at him:
“Do you want to ruin me, so that never again shall I be able to carry
the message, to carry salvation, to the desperate souls who are
everywhere waiting for me, crying for my help? Is that your
purpose—you, the elect, the people chosen to help me in the service of
the dear Lord Jesus himself? Is that your purpose? Is it? Is it?”
She began sobbing, which was Elmer’s cue to jump up and have a wonderful
new idea.
He knew, did Elmer, that the dear brethren and sisters had no such
purpose. They just wanted to be practical. Well, why wouldn’t it be a
good notion for the committee to go to the well-to-do church-members and
explain the unparalleled situation; tell them that this was the Lord’s
work, and that aside from the unquestioned spiritual benefits, the
revival would do so much good that crime would cease, and taxes thus be
lessened; that workmen would turn from agitation to higher things, and
work more loyally at the same wages. If they got enough pledges from the
rich for current expenses, those expenses would not have to be stressed
at the meetings, and people could properly be coaxed to save up for the
final “thank offering”; not have to be nagged to give more than small
coins at the nightly collections.
There were other annoyances to discuss with the local committee. Why,
Elmer would demand, hadn’t they provided enough dressing-rooms in the
tabernacle? Sister Falconer needed privacy. Sometimes just before the
meeting she and he had to have important conferences. Why hadn’t they
provided more volunteer ushers? He must have them at once, to train
them, for it was the ushers, when properly coached, who would ease
struggling souls up to the altar for the skilled finishing touches by
the experts.
Had they planned to invite big delegations from the local
institutions—from Smith Brothers’ Catsup Factory, from the car-shops,
from the packing house? Oh, yes, they must plan to stir up these
institutions; an evening would be dedicated to each of them, the
representatives would be seated together, and they’d have such a happy
time singing their favorite hymns.
By this time, a little dazed, the local committee were granting
everything; and they looked almost convinced when Sharon wound up with a
glad ringing:
“All of you must look forward, and joyfully, to a sacrifice of time and
money in these meetings. We have come here at a great sacrifice, and we
are here only to help you.”
IV
The afternoon and evening sermons—those were the high points of the
meetings, when Sharon cried in a loud voice, her arms out to them,
“Surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not,” and “All our
righteousness is as filthy rags,” and “We have sinned and come short of
the glory of God,” and “Oh, for the man to arise in me, that the man I
am may cease to be,” and “Get right with God,” and “I am not ashamed of
the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation.”
But before even these guaranteed appeals could reach wicked hearts, the
audience had to be prepared for emotion, and to accomplish this there
was as much labor behind Sharon’s eloquence as there is of wardrobes and
scene-shifters and box offices behind the frenzy of Lady Macbeth. Of
this preparation Elmer had a great part.
He took charge, as soon as she had trained him, of the men personal
workers, leaving the girls to the Director of Personal Work, a young
woman who liked dancing and glass jewelry but who was admirable at
listening to the confessions of spinsters. His workers were
bank-tellers, bookkeepers in wholesale groceries, shoe clerks, teachers
of manual training. They canvassed shops, wholesale warehouses, and
factories, and held noon meetings in offices, where they explained that
the most proficient use of shorthand did not save one from the
probability of hell. For Elmer explained that prospects were more likely
to be converted if they came to the meetings with a fair amount of fear.
When they were permitted, the workers were to go from desk to desk,
talking to each victim about the secret sins he was comfortably certain
to have. And both men and women workers were to visit the humbler homes
and offer to kneel and pray with the floury and embarrassed wife, the
pipe-wreathed and shoeless husband.
All the statistics of the personal work—so many souls invited to come
to the altar, so many addresses to workmen over their lunch-pails, so
many cottage prayers, with the length of each—were rather imaginatively
entered by Elmer and the Director of Personal Work on the balance-sheet
which Sharon used as a report after the meetings and as a talking-point
for the sale of future meetings.
Elmer met daily with Adelbert Shoop, that yearning and innocent tenor
who was in charge of music, to select hymns. There were times when the
audiences had to be lulled into confidence by “Softly and Tenderly Jesus
Is Calling,” times when they were made to feel brotherly and rustic with
“It’s the Old-time Religion”—
It was good for Paul and Silas
And it’s good enough for me—
and times when they had to be stirred by “At the Cross” or “Onward,
Christian Soldiers.” Adelbert had ideas about what he called “worship by
melody,” but Elmer saw that the real purpose of singing was to lead the
audience to a state of mind where they would do as they were told.
He learned to pick out letters on the typewriter with two fingers, and
he answered Sharon’s mail—all of it that she let him see. He kept books
for her, in a ragged sufficient manner, on check-book stubs. He wrote
the nightly story of her sermons, which the newspapers cut down and
tucked in among stories of remarkable conversions. He talked to local
church-pillars so rich and moral that their own pastors were afraid of
them. And he invented an aid to salvation which to this day is used in
the more evangelistic meetings, though it is credited to Adelbert Shoop.
Adelbert was up to most of the current diversions. He urged the men and
the women to sing against each other. At the tense moment when Sharon
was calling for converts, Adelbert would skip down the aisle, fat but
nimble, pink with coy smiles, tapping people on the shoulder, singing
the chorus of a song right among them, and often returning with three or
four prisoners of the sword of the Lord, flapping his plump arms and
caroling “They’re coming—they’re coming,” which somehow started a
stampede to the altar.
Adelbert was, in his girlish enthusiasm, almost as good as Sharon or
Elmer at announcing, “Tonight, you are all of you to be evangelists.
Every one of you now! Shake hands with the person to your right and ask
’em if they’re saved.”
He gloated over their embarrassment.
He really was a man of parts. Nevertheless, it was Elmer, not Adelbert,
who invented the “Hallelujah Yell.”
Remembering his college cheers, remembering how greatly it had
encouraged him in kneeing the opposing tackle or jabbing the rival
center’s knee, Elmer observed to himself, “Why shouldn’t we have yells
in this game, too?”
He himself wrote the first one known in history.
Hallelujah, praise God, hal, hal, hal!
Hallelujah, praise God, hal, hal, hal!
All together, I feel better,
Hal, hal, hal,
For salvation of the nation—
Aaaaaaaaaaa—_men_!
That was a thing to hear, when Elmer led them; when he danced before
them, swinging his big arms and bellowing, “Now again! Two yards to
gain! Two yards for the Savior! Come on, boys and girls, it’s our team!
Going to let ’em down? Not on your life! Come on then, you chipmunks,
and lemme hear you knock the ole roof off! Hal, hal, hal!”
Many a hesitating boy, a little sickened by the intense brooding
femininity of Sharon’s appeal, was thus brought up to the platform to
shake hands with Elmer and learn the benefits of religion.
V
The gospel crew could never consider their converts as human beings,
like waiters or manicurists or brakemen, but they had in them such a
professional interest as surgeons take in patients, critics in an
author, fishermen in trout.
They were obsessed by the gaffer in Terre Haute who got converted every
single night during the meetings. He may have been insane and he may
have been a plain drunk, but every evening he came in looking adenoidal
and thoroughly backslidden; every evening he slowly woke to his higher
needs during the sermon; and when the call for converts came, he leaped
up, shouted “Hallelujah, I’ve found it!” and galloped forward, elbowing
real and valuable prospects out of the aisle. The crew waited for him as
campers for a mosquito.
In Scranton, they had unusually exasperating patients. Scranton had been
saved by a number of other evangelists before their arrival, and had
become almost anesthetic. Ten nights they sweated over the audience
without a single sinner coming forward, and Elmer had to go out and hire
half a dozen convincing converts.
He found them in a mission near the river, and explained that by giving
a good example to the slothful, they would be doing the work of God, and
that if the example was good enough, he would give them five dollars
apiece. The missioner himself came in during the conference and offered
to get converted for ten, but he was so well known that Elmer had to
give him the ten to stay away.
His gang of converts was very impressive, but thereafter no member of
the evangelistic troupe was safe. The professional Christians besieged
the tent night and day. They wanted to be saved again. When they were
refused, they offered to produce new converts at five dollars
apiece—three dollars apiece—fifty cents and a square meal. By this
time enough authentic and free enthusiasts were appearing, and though
they were fervent, they did not relish being saved in company with
hoboes who smelled. When the half-dozen cappers were thrown out, bodily,
by Elmer and Art Nichols, they took to coming to the meetings and
catcalling, so that for the rest of the series they had to be paid a
dollar a night each to stay away.
No, Elmer could not consider the converts human. Sometimes when he was
out in the audience, playing the bullying hero that Judson Roberts had
once played with him, he looked up at the platform, where a row of men
under conviction knelt with their arms on chairs and their broad butts
toward the crowd, and he wanted to snicker and wield a small plank. But
five minutes after he would be up there, kneeling with a sewing-machine
agent with the day-after shakes, his arm round the client’s shoulder,
pleading in the tones of a mother cow, “Can’t you surrender to Christ,
Brother? Don’t you want to give up all the dreadful habits that are
ruining you—keeping you back from success? Listen! God’ll help you make
good! And when you’re lonely, old man, remember he’s there, waiting to
talk to you!”
VI
They generally, before the end of the meetings, worked up gratifying
feeling. Often young women knelt panting, their eyes blank, their lips
wide with ecstasy. Sometimes, when Sharon was particularly fired, they
actually had the phenomena of the great revivals of 1800. People
twitched and jumped with the holy jerks, old people under pentecostal
inspiration spoke in unknown tongues—completely unknown; women
stretched out senseless, their tongues dripping; and once occurred what
connoisseurs regard as the highest example of religious inspiration.
Four men and two women crawled about a pillar, barking like dogs,
“barking the devil out of the tree.”
Sharon relished these miracles. They showed her talent; they were sound
manifestations of Divine Power. But sometimes they got the meetings a
bad name, and cynics prostrated her by talking of “Holy Rollers.”
Because of this maliciousness and because of the excitement which she
found in meetings so favored by the Holy Ghost, Elmer had particularly
to comfort her after them.
VII
All the members of the evangelistic crew planned effects to throw a
brighter limelight on Sharon. There was feverish discussions of her
costumes. Adelbert had planned the girdled white robe in which she
appeared as priestess, and he wanted her to wear it always. “You are so
queeeeenly,” he whimpered. But Elmer insisted on changes, on keeping the
robe for crucial meetings, and Sharon went out for embroidered golden
velvet frocks and, at meetings for business women, smart white flannel
suits.
They assisted her also in the preparation of new sermons.
Her “message” was delivered under a hypnotism of emotion, without
connection with her actual life. Now Portia, now Ophelia, now Francesca,
she drew men to her, did with them as she would. Or again she saw
herself as veritably the scourge of God. But however richly she could
pour out passion, however flamingly she used the most exotic words and
the most complex sentiments when some one had taught them to her, it was
impossible for her to originate any sentiment more profound than “I’m
unhappy.”
She read nothing, after Cecil Aylston’s going, but the Bible and the
advertisements of rival evangelists in the bulletin of the Moody Bible
Institute.
Lacking Cecil, it was a desperate and coöperative affair to furnish
Sharon with fresh sermons as she grew tired of acting the old ones.
Adelbert Shoop provided the poetry. He was fond of poetry. He read Ella
Wheeler Wilcox, James Whitcomb Riley, and Thomas Moore. He was also a
student of philosophy: he could understand Ralph Waldo Trine perfectly,
and he furnished for Sharon’s sermons both the couplets about Home and
Little Ones, and the philosophical points about will-power, Thoughts are
Things, and Love is Beauty, Beauty is Love, Love is All.
The lady Director of Personal Work had unexpected talent in making up
anecdotes about the death-beds of drunkards and agnostics; Lily
Anderson, the pretty though anemic pianist, had once been a
school-teacher and had read a couple of books about scientists, so she
was able to furnish data with which Sharon absolutely confuted the
rising fad of evolution; and Art Nichols, the cornetist, provided rude
but moral Maine humor, stories about horse-trading, cabbages, and hard
cider, very handy for cajoling skeptical business men. But Elmer, being
trained theologically, had to weave all the elements—dogma, poetry to
the effect that God’s palette held the sunsets or ever the world began,
confessions of the dismally damned, and stories of Maine
barn-dances—into one ringing whole.
And meanwhile, besides the Reverend Sister Falconer and the Reverend Mr.
Gantry, thus coöperative, there were Sharon and Elmer and a crew of
quite human people with grievances, traveling together, living together,
not always in a state of happy innocence.