I
WITH women Elmer had always considered himself what he called a “quick
worker,” but the properties of the ministry, the delighted suspicion
with which the gossips watched a preacher who went courting, hindered
his progress with Cleo. He could not, like the young blades in town,
walk with Cleo up the railroad tracks or through the willow-shaded
pasture by Banjo River. He could hear ten thousand Methodist elders
croaking, “Avoid the vurry _appearance_ of evil.”
He knew that she was in love with him—had been ever since she had first
seen him, a devout yet manly leader, standing by the pulpit in the late
light of summer afternoon. He was certain that she would surrender to
him whenever he should demand it. He was certain that she had every
desirable quality. And yet—
Oh, somehow, she did not stir him. Was he afraid of being married and
settled and monogamic? Was it simply that she needed awakening? How
could he awaken her when her father was always in the way?
Whenever he called on her, old Benham insisted on staying in the parlor.
He was, strictly outside of business hours, an amateur of religion, fond
of talking about it. Just as Elmer, shielded by the piano, was ready to
press Cleo’s hand, Benham would lumber up and twang, “What do you think,
Brother? Do you believe salvation comes by faith or works?”
Elmer made it all clear—muttering to himself, “Well, you, you old
devil, with that cut-throat store of yours, you better get into Heaven
on faith, for God knows you’ll never do it on works!”
And when Elmer was about to slip out to the kitchen with her to make
lemonade, Benham held him by demanding, “What do you think of John
Wesley’s doctrine of perfection?”
“Oh, it’s absolutely sound and proven,” admitted Elmer, wondering what
the devil Mr. Wesley’s doctrine of perfection might be.
It is possible that the presence of the elder Benhams, preventing too
close a communion with Cleo, kept Elmer from understanding what it meant
that he should not greatly have longed to embrace her. He translated his
lack of urgency into virtue; and went about assuring himself that he was
indeed a reformed and perfected character . . . and so went home and
hung about the kitchen, chattering with little Jane Clark in pastoral
jokiness.
Even when he was alone with Cleo, when she drove him in the proud Benham
motor for calls in the country, even while he was volubly telling
himself how handsome she was, he was never quite natural with her.
II
He called on an evening of late November, and both her parents were out,
attending Eastern Star. She looked dreary and red-eyed. He crowed
benevolently while they stood at the parlor door, “Why, Sister Cleo,
what’s the matter? You look kind of sad.”
“Oh, it’s nothing—”
“Come on now! Tell me! I’ll pray for you, or beat somebody up, whichever
you prefer!”
“Oh, I don’t think you ought to joke about—— Anyway, it’s really
nothing.”
She was staring at the floor. He felt buoyant and dominating, so
delightfully stronger than she. He lifted her chin with his forefinger,
demanding, “Look up at me now!”
In her naked eyes there was such shameful, shameless longing for him
that he was drawn. He could not but slip his arm around her, and she
dropped her head on his shoulder, weeping, all her pride gone from her.
He was so exalted by the realization of his own power that he took it
for passion, and suddenly he was kissing her, conscious of the pale
fineness of her skin, her flattering yielding to him; suddenly he was
blurting, “I’ve loved you, oh, terrible, ever since the first second I
saw you!”
As she sat on his knee, as she drooped against him unresisting, he was
certain that she was very beautiful, altogether desirable.
The Benhams came home—Mrs. Benham to cry happily over the engagement,
and Mr. Benham to indulge in a deal of cordial back-slapping, and such
jests as, “Well, by golly, now I’m going to have a real live preacher in
the family, guess I’ll have to be so doggone honest that the store won’t
hardly pay!”
III
His mother came on from Kansas for the wedding, in January. Her
happiness in seeing him in his pulpit, in seeing the beauty and purity
of Cleo—and the prosperity of Cleo’s father—was such that she forgot
her long dragging sorrow in his many disloyalties to the God she had
given him, in his having deserted the Baptist sanctuary for the dubious,
the almost agnostic liberalisms of the Methodists.
With his mother present, with Cleo going about roused to a rosy
excitement, with Mrs. Benham mothering everybody and frantically
cooking, with Mr. Benham taking him out to the back-porch and presenting
him with a check for five thousand dollars, Elmer had the feeling of
possessing a family, of being rooted and solid and secure.
For the wedding there were scores of cocoanut cakes and hundreds of
orange blossoms, roses from a real city florist in Sparta, new
photographs for the family album, a tub of strictly temperance punch and
beautiful but modest lingerie for Cleo. It was tremendous. But Elmer was
a little saddened by the fact that there was no one whom he wanted for
best man; no one who had been his friend since Jim Lefferts.
He asked Ray Faucett, butter-maker at the creamery and choir-singer in
the church, and the village was flattered that out of the hundreds of
intimates Elmer must have in the great world outside, he should have
chosen one of their own boys.
They were married, during a half blizzard, by the district
superintendent. They took the train for Zenith, to stop overnight on
their way to Chicago.
Not till he was on the train, the shouting and the rice-showers over,
did Elmer gasp to himself, looking at Cleo’s rather unchanging smile,
“Oh, good God, I’ve gone and tied myself up, and I never can have any
fun again!”
But he was very manly, gentlemanly in fact; he concealed his distaste
for her and entertained her with an account of the beauties of
Longfellow.
IV
Cleo looked tired, and toward the end of the journey, in the winter
evening, with the gale desolate, she seemed scarce to be listening to
his observations on graded Sunday School lessons, the treatment of
corns, his triumphs at Sister Falconer’s meetings, and the inferiority
of the Reverend Clyde Tippey.
“Well, you might pay a _little_ attention to me, anyway!” he snarled.
“Oh, I’m sorry! I really was paying attention. I’m just tired—all the
preparations for the wedding and everything.” She looked at him
beseechingly. “Oh, Elmer, you must take care of me! I’m giving myself to
you entirely—oh, completely.”
“Huh! So you look at it as a _sacrifice_ to marry me, do you!”
“Oh, no, I _didn’t_ mean it that way—”
“And I suppose you think I don’t intend to take care of you! Sure!
Prob’ly I stay out late nights and play cards and gamble and drink and
run around after women! Of course! I’m not a minister of the gospel—I’m
a saloon-keeper!”
“Oh, dear, dear, dear, oh, my dearest, I didn’t mean to hurt you! I just
meant—— You’re so strong and big, and I’m—oh, of course I’m not a
tiny little thing, but I haven’t got your strength.”
He enjoyed feeling injured, but he was warning himself, “Shut up, you
chump! You’ll never educate her to make love if you go bawling her out.”
He magnanimously comforted her: “Oh, I know. Of course, you poor dear.
Fool thing anyway, your mother having this big wedding, and all the eats
and the relatives coming in and everything.”
And with all this, she still seemed distressed.
But he patted her hand, and talked about the cottage they were going to
furnish in Banjo Crossing; and as he thought of the approaching Zenith,
of their room at the O’Hearn House (there was no necessity for a whole
suite, as formerly, when he had had to impress his Prosperity pupils),
he became more ardent, whispered to her that she was beautiful, stroked
her arm till she trembled.
V
The bell-boy had scarcely closed the door of their room, with its double
bed, when he had seized her, torn off her overcoat, with its snow-wet
collar, and hurled it on the floor. He kissed her throat. When he had
loosened his clasp, she retreated, the back of her hand fearfully at her
lips, her voice terrified as she begged, “Oh, don’t! Not now! I’m
afraid!”
“That’s damned nonsense!” he raged, stalking her as she backed away.
“Oh, no, please!”
“Say, what the devil do you think marriage is?”
“Oh, I’ve never heard you curse before!”
“My God, I wouldn’t, if you didn’t act so’s it’d try the patience of a
saint on a monument!” He controlled himself. “Now, now, now! I’m sorry!
Guess I’m kind of tired, too. There, there, little girl. Didn’t mean to
scare you. Excuse me. Just showed I was crazy in love with you, don’t
you see?”
To his broad and apostolic smirk she responded with a weak smile, and he
seized her again, laid his thick hand on her breast. Between his long
embraces, though his anger at her limpness was growing, he sought to
encourage her by shouting, “Come on now, Clee, show some spunk!”
She did not forbid him again; she was merely a pale acquiescence—pale
save when she flushed unhappily as he made fun of the old-fashioned,
long-sleeved nightgown which she timidly put on in the indifferent
privacy of the bathroom.
“Gee, you might as well wear a gunny-sack!” he roared, holding out his
arms. She tried to look confident as she slowly moved toward him. She
did not succeed.
“Fellow _ought_ to be brutal, for her own sake,” he told himself, and
seized her shoulders.
When he awoke beside her and found her crying, he really did have to
speak up to her.
“You look here now! The fact you’re a preacher’s wife doesn’t keep you
from being human! You’re a fine one to teach brats in Sunday School!” he
said, and many other strong spirited things, while she wept, her hair
disordered round her meek face, which he hated.
VI
The discovery that Cleo would never be a lively lover threw him the more
into ambition when they had returned to Banjo Crossing.
Cleo, though she was unceasingly bewildered by his furies, found
something of happiness in furnishing their small house, arranging his
books, admiring his pulpit eloquence, and in receiving, as the Pastor’s
Wife, homage even from her old friends. He was able to forget her, and
all his thought went to his holy climbing. He was eager for the Annual
Conference, in spring; he had to get on, to a larger town, a larger
church.
He was bored by Banjo Crossing. The life of a small-town preacher,
prevented from engaging even in the bucolic pleasures, is rather duller
than that of a watchman at a railroad-crossing.
Elmer hadn’t, actually, enough to do. Though later, in “institutional
churches,” he was to be as hustling as any other business man, now he
had not over twenty hours a week of real activity. There were four
meetings every Sunday, if he attended Sunday School and Epworth League
as well as church; there was prayer-meeting on Wednesday evening, choir
practise on Friday, the Ladies’ Aid and the Missionary Society every
fortnight or so, and perhaps once a fortnight a wedding, a funeral.
Pastoral calls took not over six hours a week. With the aid of his
reference books, he could prepare his two sermons in five hours—and on
weeks when he felt lazy, or the fishing was good, that was three hours
more than he actually took.
In the austerities of the library Elmer was indolent, but he did like to
rush about, meet people, make a show of accomplishment. It wasn’t
possible to accomplish much in Banjo. The good villagers were content
with Sunday and Wednesday-evening piety.
But he did begin to write advertisements for his weekly services—the
inception of that salesmanship of salvation which was to make him known
and respected in every advertising club and forward-looking church in
the country. The readers of notices to the effect that services would be
held, as usual, in the _Banjo Valley Pioneer_ were startled to find
among the Presbyterian Church, the Disciples Church, the United Brethren
Church, the Baptist Church, this advertisement:
WAKE UP, MR. DEVIL!
If old Satan were as lazy as some would-be Christians in this
burg, we’d all be safe. But he isn’t! Come out next Sunday,
10:30 A. M. and hear a red-blooded sermon by Rev. Gantry on
WOULD JESUS PLAY POKER?
M. E. Church
He improved his typewriting, and that was a fine thing to do. The
Reverend Elmer Gantry’s powerful nature had been cramped by the slow use
of a pen; it needed the gallop of the keys; and from his typewriter were
increasingly to come floods of new moral and social gospels.
In February he held two weeks of intensive evangelistic meetings. He had
in a traveling missioner, who wept, and his wife, who sang. Neither of
them, Elmer chuckled privily, could compare with himself, who had worked
with Sharon Falconer. But they were new to Banjo Crossing, and he saw to
it that it was himself who at the climax of hysteria charged down into
the frightened mob and warned them that unless they came up and knelt in
subjection, they might be snatched to hell before breakfast.
There were twelve additions to the church, and five renewals of faith on
the part of backsliders, and Elmer was able to have published in the
_Western Christian Advocate_ a note which carried his credit through all
the circles of the saints:
The church at Banjo Crossing has had a remarkable and stirring
revival under Brother T. R. Feesels and Sister Feesels, the
singing evangelist, assisted by the local pastor, Reverend
Gantry, who was himself formerly in evangelistic work as
assistant to the late Sharon Falconer. A great outpouring of the
spirit and far-reaching results are announced, with many uniting
with the church.
He also, after letting the town know how much it added to his burdens,
revived and every week for two weeks personally supervised a Junior
Epworth League—the juvenile department of that admirable association of
young people whose purpose is, it has itself announced, to “take the
_wreck_ out of recreation and make it re-creation.”
He had a note from Bishop Toomis hinting that the bishop had most
gratifying reports from the district superintendent about Elmer’s
“diligent and genuinely creative efforts” and hinting that at the coming
Annual Conference, Elmer would be shifted to a considerably larger
church.
“Fine!” glowed Elmer. “Gosh, I’ll be glad to get away. These rubes here
get about as much out of high-class religion, like I give them, as a
fleet of mules!”
VII
Ishuah Rogers was dead, and they were holding his funeral at the
Methodist Church. As farmer, as store-keeper, as postmaster, he had
lived all his seventy-nine years in Banjo Crossing.
Old J. F. Whittlesey was shaken by Ishuah’s death. They had been boys
together, young men together, neighbors on the farm, and in his last
years, when Ishuah was nearly blind and living with his daughter Jenny,
J. F. Whittlesey had come into town every day to spend hours sitting
with him on the porch, wrangling over Blaine and Grover Cleveland.
Whittlesey hadn’t another friend left alive. To drive past Jenny’s now
and not see old Ishuah made the world empty.
He was in the front row at the church; he could see his friend’s face in
the open coffin. All of Ishuah’s meanness and fussiness and care was
wiped out; there was only the dumb nobility with which he had faced
blizzard and August heat, labor and sorrow; only the heroic thing
Whittlesey had loved in him.
And he would not see Ishuah again, ever.
He listened to Elmer, who, his eyes almost filled at the drama of a
church full of people mourning their old friend, lulled them with
Revelation’s triumphant song:
These are they that come out of the great tribulation, and they
washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the
Lamb. Therefore are they before the throne of God; and they
serve him day and night in his temple; and he that sitteth on
the throne shall spread his tabernacle over them. They shall
hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun
strike upon them, nor any heat: for the Lamb that is in the
midst of the throne shall be their shepherd, and shall guide
them unto fountains of waters of life: and God shall wipe away
every tear from their eyes.
They sang “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” and Elmer led the singing,
while old Whittlesey tried to pipe up with them.
They filed past the coffin. When Whittlesey had this last moment’s
glimpse of Ishuah’s sunken face, his dry eyes were blind, and he
staggered.
Elmer caught him with his great arms, and whispered, “He has gone to his
glory, to his great reward! Don’t let’s sorrow for him!”
In Elmer’s confident strength old Whittlesey found reassurance. He clung
to him, muttering, “God bless you, Brother,” before he hobbled out.
VIII
“You were wonderful at the funeral today! I’ve never seen you so sure of
immortality,” worshiped Cleo, as they walked home.
“Yuh, but they don’t appreciate it—not even when I said about how this
old fellow was a sure-enough hero. We got to get on to some burg where
I’ll have a chance.”
“Don’t you think God’s in Banjo Crossing as much as in a city?”
“Oh, now, Cleo, don’t go and get religious on me! You simply can’t
understand how it takes it out of a fellow to do a funeral right and
send ’em all home solaced. You may find God here, but you don’t find the
salaries!”
He was not angry with Cleo now, nor bullying. In these two months he had
become indifferent to her; indifferent enough to stop hating her and to
admire her conduct of the Sunday School, her tactful handling of the
good sisters of the church when they came snooping to the parsonage.
“I think I’ll take a little walk,” he muttered when they reached home.
He came to the Widow Clark’s house, where he had lived as bachelor.
Jane was out in the yard, the March breeze molding her skirt about her;
rosy face darker and eyes more soft as she saw the pastor hailing her,
magnificently raising his hat.
She fluttered toward him.
“You folks ever miss me? Guess you’re glad to get rid of the poor old
preacher that was always cluttering up the house!”
“We miss you awfully!”
He felt his whole body yearning toward her. Hurriedly he left her, and
wished he hadn’t left her, and hastened to get himself far from the
danger to his respectability. He hated Cleo again now, in an injured,
puzzled way.
“I think I’ll sneak up to Sparta this week,” he fumed, then: “No!
Conference coming in ten days; can’t take any chances till after that.”
IX
The Annual Conference, held in Sparta, late in March. The high time of
the year, when the Methodist preachers of half a dozen districts met
together for prayer and rejoicing, to hear of the progress of the
Kingdom and incidentally to learn whether they were to have better jobs
this coming year.
The bishop presiding—Wesley R. Toomis, himself—with his district
superintendents, grave and bustling.
The preachers, trying to look as though prospective higher salaries were
unworthy their attention.
Between meetings they milled about in the large auditorium of the
Preston Memorial Methodist Church: visiting laymen and nearly three
hundred ministers.
Veteran country parsons, whiskered and spectacled, rusty-coated and
stooped, still serving two country churches, or three or four; driving
their fifty miles a week; content for reading with the Scriptures and
the weekly _Advocate_.
New-fledged country preachers, their large hands still calloused from
plow-handle and reins, content for learning with two years of high
school, content with the Old Testament for history and geology.
The preachers of the larger towns; most of them hard to recognize as
clerics, in their neat business suits and modest four-in-hands;
frightfully cordial one to another; perhaps a quarter of them known as
modernists and given to reading popular manuals of biology and
psychology; the other three-quarters still devoted to banging the pulpit
apropos of Genesis.
But moving through these masses, easily noticeable, the inevitable
successes: the district superintendents, the pastors of large city
congregations, the conceivable candidates for college presidencies,
mission-boards, boards of publication, bishoprics.
They were not all of them leonine and actor-like, these staff officers.
No few were gaunt, or small, wiry, spectacled, and earnest; but they
were all admirable politicians, long in memory of names, quick to find
flattering answers. They believed that the Lord rules everything, but
that it was only friendly to help him out; and that the enrollment of
political allies helped almost as much as prayer in becoming known as
suitable material for lucrative pastorates.
Among these leaders were the Savonarolas, gloomy fellows, viewing the
progress of machine civilization with biliousness; capable of drawing
thousands of auditors by their spicy but chaste denunciations of
burglary, dancing, and show-windows filled with lingerie.
Then the renowned liberals, preachers who filled city tabernacles or
churches in university towns by showing that skipping whatever seemed
unreasonable in the Bible did not interfere with considering it all
divinely inspired, and that there are large moral lessons in the
paintings of Landseer and Rosa Bonheur.
Most notable among the aristocrats were a certain number of large,
suave, deep-voiced, inescapably cordial clerical gentlemen who would
have looked well in Shakespearean productions or as floor-walkers. And
with them was presently to be found the Reverend Elmer Gantry.
He was a new-comer, he was merely hoping to have the Conference
recognize his credentials and accept him as a member, and he had only a
tiny church, yet from somewhere crept the rumor that he was a man to be
watched, to be enrolled in one’s own political machine; and he was
called “Brother” by a pastor whose sacred rating was said to be not less
than ten thousand a year. They observed him; they conversed with him not
only on the sacraments but on automobiles and the use of
pledge-envelopes; and as they felt the warmth of his handshake, as they
heard the amiable bim-bom of his voice, saw his manly eyes, untroubled
by doubts or scruples, and noted that he wore his morning clothes as
well as any spiritual magnate among them, they greeted him and sought
him out and recognized him as a future captain of the hosts of the
Almighty.
Cleo’s graciousness added to his prestige.
For three whole days before bringing her up to the Conference, Elmer had
gone out of his way to soothe her, flatter her, assure her that whatever
misunderstandings they might have had, all was now a warm snugness of
domestic bliss, so that she was eager, gently deferential to the wives
of older pastors as she met them at receptions at hotels.
Her obvious admiration of Elmer convinced the better clerical
politicians of his domestic safeness.
And they knew that he had been sent for by the bishop—oh, they knew it!
Nothing that the bishop did in these critical days was not known. There
were many among the middle-aged ministers who had become worried over
prolonged stays in small towns, and who wanted to whisper to the bishop
how well they would suit larger opportunities. (The list of appointments
had already been made out by the bishop and his council, yet surely it
could be changed a little—just the least bit.) But they could not get
near him. Most of the time the bishop was kept hidden from them at the
house of the president of Winnemac Wesleyan University.
But he sent for Elmer, and even called him by his first name.
“You see, Brother Elmer, I was right! The Methodist Church just suits
you,” said the bishop, his eyes bright under his formidable brows. “I am
able to give you a larger church already. It wouldn’t be cricket, as the
English say—ah, England! how you will enjoy going there some time; you
will find such a fruitful source of the broader type of sermons in
travel; I know that you and your lovely bride—I’ve had the pleasure of
having her pointed out to me—you will both know the joy and romance of
travel one of these days. But as I was saying: I can give you a rather
larger town this time, though it wouldn’t be proper to tell you which
one till I read the list of appointments to the Conference. And in the
near future, if you continue as you have in your studies and attention
to the needs of your flock and in your excellence of daily living, which
the district superintendent has noted, why, you’ll be due for a _much_
larger field of service. God bless you!”
X
Elmer was examined by the Conference and readily admitted to membership.
Among the questions, from the Discipline, which he was able to answer
with a hearty “yes” were these:
Are you going on to perfection?
Do you expect to be made perfect in love in this life?
Are you earnestly striving after it?
Are you resolved to devote yourself wholly to God and his work?
Have you considered the Rules for a Preacher, especially those relating
to Diligence, to Punctuality, and to Doing the Work to which you are
assigned?
Will you recommend fasting or diligence, both by precept and example?
* * * * * * *
It was, the Conference members said, one to another, a pleasure to
examine a candidate who could answer the questions with such ringing
certainty.
* * * * * * *
Celebrating his renunciation of all fleshy devices and pleasures by
wolfing a steak, fried onions, fried potatoes, corn, three cups of
coffee, and two slices of apple pie with ice cream, Elmer condescended
to Cleo, “I went through a-whooping! Liked to of seen any of those poor
boobs I was with in the seminary answer up like I did!”
XI
They listened to reports on collections for missions, on the creation of
new schools and churches; they heard ever so many prayers; they were
polite during what were known as “inspirational addresses” by the bishop
and the Rev. Dr. S. Palmer Shootz. But they were waiting for the moment
when the bishop should read the list of appointments.
They looked as blank as they could, but their nails creased their palms
as the bishop rose. They tried to be loyal to their army, but this lean
parson thought of the boy who was going to college, this worried-faced
youngster thought of the operation for his wife, this aged campaigner
whose voice had been failing wondered whether he would be kept on in his
well-padded church.
The bishop’s snappy voice popped:
Sparta District:
Albee Center, W. A. Vance
Ardmore, Abraham Mundon—
And Elmer listened with them, suddenly terrified.
What did the bishop mean by a “rather larger town”? Some horrible hole
with twelve hundred people?
Then he startled and glowed, and his fellow priests nodded to him in
congratulation, as the bishop read out “Rudd Center, Elmer Gantry.”
For there were forty-one hundred people in Rudd Center; it was noted for
good works and a large pop factory; and he was on his way to greatness,
to inspiring the world and becoming a bishop.