I
THOUGH to the commonplace and unspeculative eye Mrs. Evans Riddle was
but a female blacksmith, yet Mrs. Riddle and her followers knew, in a
bland smirking way, that she was instituting an era in which sickness,
poverty, and folly would be ended forever.
She was the proprietor of the Victory Thought-power Headquarters, New
York, and not even in Los Angeles was there a more important center of
predigested philosophy and pansy-painted ethics. She maintained a
magazine filled with such starry thoughts as “All the world’s a road
whereon we are but fellow wayfarers.” She held morning and vesper
services on Sunday at Euterpean Hall, on Eighty-seventh Street, and
between moments of Silent Thought she boxed with the inexplicable. She
taught, or farmed out, classes in Concentration, Prosperity, Love,
Metaphysics, Oriental Mysticism, and the Fourth Dimension.
She instructed small Select Circles how to keep one’s husband, how to
understand Sanskrit philosophy without understanding either Sanskrit or
philosophy, and how to become slim without giving up pastry. She healed
all the diseases in the medical dictionary, and some which were not; and
in personal consultations, at ten dollars the half-hour, she explained
to unappetizing elderly ladies how they might rouse passion in a
football hero.
She had a staff, including a real Hindu swami—anyway, he was a real
Hindu—but she was looking for a first assistant.
II
The Reverend Elmer Gantry had failed as an independent evangelist.
He had been quite as noisy and threatening as the average evangelist; to
reasonably large gatherings he had stated that the Judgment Day was
rather more than likely to occur before six A. M., and he had told all
the chronic anecdotes of the dying drunkard. But there was something
wrong. He could not make it go.
Sharon was with him, beckoning him, intolerably summoning him,
intolerably rebuking him. Sometimes he worshiped her as the shadow of a
dead god; always he was humanly lonely for her and her tantrums and her
electric wrath and her abounding laughter. In pulpits he felt like an
impostor, and in hotel bedrooms he ached for her voice.
Worst of all, he was expected everywhere to tell of her “brave death in
the cause of the Lord.” He was very sick about it.
Mrs. Evans Riddle invited him to join her.
Elmer had no objection to the malted milk of New Thought. But after
Sharon, Mrs. Riddle was too much. She shaved regularly, she smelled of
cigar smoke, yet she had a nickering fancy for warm masculine
attentions.
Elmer had to earn a living, and he had taken too much of the drug of
oratory to be able to go back to the road as a traveling-salesman. He
shrugged when he had interviewed Mrs. Riddle; he told her that she would
be an inspiration to a young man like himself; he held her hand; he went
out and washed his hand; and determined that since he was to dwell in
the large brownstone house which was both her Thought-power Headquarters
and her home, he would keep his door locked.
The preparation for his labors was not too fatiguing. He read through
six copies of Mrs. Riddle’s magazine and, just as he had learned the
trade-terms of evangelism, so he learned the technologies of New
Thought: the Cosmic Law of Vibration; I Affirm the Living Thought. He
labored through a chapter of “The Essence of Oriental Mysticism,
Occultism, and Esotericism” and accomplished seven pages of the
“Bhagavad-Gita”; and thus was prepared to teach disciples how to win
love and prosperity.
In actual practise he had much less of treading the Himalayan heights
than of pleasing Mrs. Evans Riddle. Once she discovered that he had
small fancy for sitting up after midnight with her, she was rather sharp
about his bringing in new chelas—as, out of “Kim,” she called paying
customers.
Occasionally he took Sunday morning service for Mrs. Riddle at Euterpean
Hall, when she was weary of curing rheumatism or when she was suffering
from rheumatism; and always he had to be at Euterpean to give spiritual
assistance. She liked to have her hairy arm stroked just before she went
out to preach, and that was not too hard a task—usually he could
recover while she was out on the platform. She turned over to him the
Personal Consultations with spinsters, and he found it comic to watch
their sharp noses quivering, their dry mouths wabbling.
But his greatest interest was given to the Prosperity Classes. To one
who had never made more than five thousand a year himself, it was
inspiring to explain before dozens of pop-eyed and admiring morons how
they could make ten thousand—fifty thousand—a million a year, and all
this by the Wonder Power of Suggestion, by Aggressive Personality, by
the Divine Rhythm, in fact by merely releasing the Inner Self-shine.
It was fun, it was an orgy of imagination, for him who had never faced
any Titan of Success of larger dimensions than the chairman of a local
evangelistic committee to instruct a thirty-a-week bookkeeper how to
stalk into Morgan’s office, fix him with the penetrating eye of the
Initiate, and borrow a hundred thousand on the spot.
But always he longed for Sharon, with a sensation of emptiness real as
the faintness of hunger and long tramping. He saw his days with her as
adventures, foot-loose, scented with fresh air. He hated himself for
having ever glanced over his shoulder, and he determined to be a
celibate all his life.
In some ways he preferred New Thought to standard Protestantism. It was
safer to play with. He had never been sure but that there might be
something to the doctrines he had preached as an evangelist. Perhaps God
really had dictated every word of the Bible. Perhaps there really was a
hell of burning sulphur. Perhaps the Holy Ghost really was hovering
around watching him and reporting. But he knew with serenity that all of
his New Thoughts, his theosophical utterances, were pure and
uncontaminated bunk. No one could deny his theories because none of his
theories meant anything. It did not matter what he said, so long as he
kept them listening; and he enjoyed the buoyancy of power as he
bespelled his classes with long, involved, fruity sentences rhapsodic as
perfume advertisements.
How agreeable on bright winter afternoons, in the gilt and velvet
elegance of the lecture hall, to look at smart women, and moan, “And,
oh, my beloved, can you not see, do you not perceive, have not your
earth-bound eyes ingathered, the supremacy of the raja’s quality which
each of us, by that inner contemplation which is the all however cloaked
by the seeming, can consummate and build loftily to higher aspiring
spheres?”
Almost any Hindu word was useful. It seems that the Hindus have Hidden
Powers which enable them to do whatever they want to, except possibly to
get rid of the Mohammedans, the plague, and the cobra. “Soul-breathing”
was also a good thing to talk about whenever he had nothing to say; and
you could always keep an audience of satin-bosomed ladies through the
last quarter-hour of lecturing by coming down hard on “Concentration.”
But with all these agreeable features, he hated Mrs. Riddle, and he
suspected that she was, as he put it, “holding out the coin on him.” He
was to have a percentage of the profits, besides his thin salary of
twenty-five hundred a year. There never were any profits, and when he
hinted that he would like to see her books—entirely out of admiration
for the beauties of accountancy—she put him off.
So he took reasonable measures of reprisal. He moved from her house; he
began to take for himself the patients who came for Personal
Consultations, and to meet them in the parlor of his new boarding-house
in Harlem. And when she was not present at his Euterpean Hall meetings,
he brought back to Victory Thought-power Headquarters only so much of
the collection as, after prayer and meditation and figuring on an
envelope, seemed suitable.
That did it.
Mrs. Evans Riddle had a regrettable suspiciousness. She caused a marked
twenty-dollar bill to be placed in the collection at vespers, a year
after Elmer had gone to work for the higher powers, and when he brought
her the collection-money minus the twenty dollars, she observed loudly,
with her grinning swami looking heathenish and sultry across the room:
“Gantry, you’re a thief! You’re fired! You have a contract, but you can
sue and be damned. Jackson!” A large negro houseman appeared. “Throw
this crook out, will you?”
III
He felt dazed and homeless and poor, but he started out with Prosperity
Classes of his own.
He did very well at Prosperity, except that he couldn’t make a living
out of it.
He spent from a month to four months in each city. He hired the ballroom
of the second-best hotel for lectures three evenings a week, and
advertised himself in the newspapers as though he were a cigarette or a
brand of soap:
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
$ $
$ The World Owes YOU a Million Dollars! $
$ Why Don’t You Collect It? $
$ $
$ What brought millions to Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie? $
$ WILL POWER! It’s within you. Learn to develop it. $
$ YOU CAN! The world-mastering secrets of the $
$ Rosicrucians and Hindu Sages revealed in twelve lessons $
$ by the renowned Psychologist $
$ $
$ ELMER GANTRY, Ph.D., D.D., Ps.D. $
$ $
$ Write or phone for FREE personal consultation $
$ $
$ THE BOWERS HOTEL $
$ Main & Sycamore $
$ $
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
His students were school-teachers who wanted to own tearooms, clerks who
wanted to be sales-managers, clergymen who wanted to be newspapermen,
newspapermen who wanted to be real estate dealers, real estate dealers
who wanted to be bishops, and widows who wanted to earn money without
loss of elegance. He lectured to them in the most beautiful language,
all out of Mrs. Riddle’s magazine.
He had a number of phrases—all stolen—and he made his disciples repeat
them in chorus, in the manner of all religions. Among the more powerful
incantations were:
I can be whatever I will to be; I turn my opened eyes on my Self
and possess whatever I desire.
I am God’s child, God created all good things including wealth,
and I will to inherit it.
I am resolute—I am utterly resolute—I fear no man, whether in
offices or elsewhere.
Power is in me, encompassing you to my demands.
Hold fast, O Subconscious, the thought of Prosperity.
In the divine book of achievements my name is written in Gold. I
am thus of the world’s nobility and now, this moment, I take
possession of my kingdom.
I am part of Universal Mind and thus I summon to me my rightful
Universal Power.
Daily my Subconscious shall tell me to not be content and go on
working for somebody else.
They were all of them ready for a million a year, except their teacher,
who was ready for bankruptcy.
He got pupils enough, but the overhead was huge and his pupils were
poor. He had to hire the ballroom, pay for advertising; he had to appear
gaudy, with a suite in the hotel, fresh linen, and newly pressed morning
coat. He sat in twenty-dollar-a-day red plush suites wondering where he
would get breakfast. He was so dismayed that he began to study himself.
He determined, with the resoluteness of terror, to be loyal to any loves
or associates he might have hereafter, to say in his prayers and sermons
practically nothing except what he believed. He yearned to go back to
Mizpah Seminary, to get Dean Trosper’s forgiveness, take a degree, and
return to the Baptist pulpit in however barren a village. But first he
must earn enough money to pay for a year in the seminary.
He had been in correspondence with the manager of the O’Hearn House in
Zenith—a city of four hundred thousand in the state of Winnemac, a
hundred miles from Mizpah. This was in 1913, before the Hotel Thornleigh
was built, and Gil O’Hearn, with his new yellow brick tavern, was trying
to take the fashionable business of Zenith away from the famous but
decayed Grand Hotel. Intellectual ballroom lectures add to the smartness
of a hotel almost as much as a great cocktail-mixer, and Mr. O’Hearn had
been moved by the prospectus of the learned and magnetic Dr. Elmer
Gantry.
Elmer could take the O’Hearn offer on a guarantee and be sure of a
living, but he needed money for a week or two before the fees should
come in.
From whom could he borrow?
Didn’t he remember reading in a Mizpah alumni bulletin that Frank
Shallard, who had served with him in the rustic church at Schoenheim,
now had a church near Zenith?
He dug out the bulletin and discovered that Frank was in Eureka, an
industrial town of forty thousand. Elmer had enough money to take him to
Eureka. All the way there he warmed up the affection with which a
borrower recalls an old acquaintance who is generous and a bit soft.