I
A YEAR he spent in Rudd Center, three years in Vulcan, and two years in
Sparta. As there were 4,100 people in Rudd Center, 47,000 in Vulcan, and
129,000 in Sparta, it may be seen that the Reverend Elmer Gantry was
climbing swiftly in Christian influence and character.
In Rudd Center he passed his Mizpah final examinations and received his
Bachelor of Divinity degree from the seminary; in Rudd Center he
discovered the art of joining, which was later to enable him to meet the
more enterprising and solid men of affairs—oculists and editors and
manufacturers of bathtubs—and enlist their practical genius in his
crusades for spirituality.
He joined the Masons, the Odd Fellows, and the Maccabees. He made the
Memorial Day address to the G. A. R., and he made the speech welcoming
the local representative home from Congress after having won the poker
championship of the House.
Vulcan was marked, aside from his labors for perfection, by the birth of
his two children—Nat, in 1916, and Bernice, whom they called Bunny, in
1917—and by his ceasing to educate his wife in his ideals of amour.
It all blew up a month after the birth of Bunny.
Elmer had, that evening, been addressing the Rod and Gun Club dinner. He
had pointed out that our Lord must have been in favor of Rods and Guns
for, he said, “I want you boys to notice that the Master, when he picked
out his first disciples, didn’t select a couple of stoop-shouldered,
pigeon-toed mollycoddles but a pair of first-class fishermen!”
He was excited to intoxication by their laughter.
Since Bunny’s birth he had been sleeping in the guest-room, but now,
walking airily, he tiptoed into Cleo’s room at eleven, with that look of
self-conscious innocence which passionless wives instantly catch and
dread.
“Well, you sweet thing, it sure went off great! They all liked my spiel.
Why, you poor lonely girl, shame you have to sleep all alone here, poor
baby!” he said, stroking her shoulder as she sat propped against the
pillows. “Guess I’ll have to come sleep here tonight.”
She breathed hard, tried to look resolute. “Please! Not yet!”
“What do you _mean_?”
“Please! I’m tired tonight. Just kiss me good-night, and let me pop off
to sleep.”
“Meaning my attentions aren’t welcome to Your Majesty!” He paced the
floor. “Young woman, it’s about time for a showdown! I’ve hinted at this
before, but I’ve been as charitable and long-suffering as I could, but,
by God, you’ve gotten away with too much, and then you try to
pretend—— ‘Just kiss me good-night!’ Sure! I’m to be a monk! I’m to
be one of these milk-and-water husbands that’s perfectly content to hang
around the house and not give one little yip if his wife don’t care for
his method of hugging! Well, believe me, young woman, you got another
guess coming, and if you think that just because I’m a preacher I’m a
Willie-boy—— You don’t even make the slightest smallest effort to
learn some passion, but just act like you had hard work putting up with
me! Believe me, there’s other women a lot better and prettier—yet, and
more religious!—that haven’t thought I was such a damn’ pest to have
around! I’m not going to stand—— Never even making the slightest
effort—”
“Oh, Elmer, I have! Honestly I have! If you’d only been more tender and
patient with me at the very first, I might have learned—”
“Rats! All damned nonsense! Trouble with you is, you always were afraid
to face hard facts! Well, I’m sick of it, young woman. You can go to the
devil! This is the last time, believe me!”
He banged the door; he had satisfaction in hearing her sob that night;
and he kept his vow about staying away from her, for almost a month.
Presently he was keeping it altogether; it was a settled thing that they
had separate bedrooms.
And all the while he was almost as confused, as wistful, as she was; and
whenever he found a woman parishioner who was willing to comfort him, or
whenever he was called on important but never explained affairs to
Sparta, he had no bold swagger of satisfaction, but a guilt, an
uneasiness of sin, which displayed itself in increasingly furious
condemnation of the same sin from his pulpit.
“O God, if I could only have gone on with Sharon, I might have been a
decent fellow,” he mourned, in his sorrow sympathetic with all the
world. But the day after, in the sanctuary, he would be salving that
sorrow by raging, “And these dance-hall proprietors, these tempters of
lovely innocent girls, whose doors open to the pit of death and horror,
they shall have reward—they shall burn in uttermost hell—burn
literally—BURN!—and for their suffering we shall have but joy that the
Lord’s justice has been resolutely done!”
II
Something like statewide fame began to cling about the Reverend Elmer
Gantry during his two years in Sparta—1918 to 1920. In the spring of
’18 he was one of the most courageous defenders of the Midwest against
the imminent invasion of the Germans. He was a Four-Minute Man. He said
violent things about atrocities, and sold Liberty Bonds hugely. He
threatened to leave Sparta to its wickedness while he went out to “take
care of our poor boys” as a chaplain, and he might have done so had the
war lasted another year.
In Sparta, too, he crept from timidly sensational church advertisements
to such blasts as must have shaken the Devil himself. Anyway, they
brought six hundred delighted sinners to church every Sunday evening,
and after one sermon on the horrors of booze, a saloon-keeper, slightly
intoxicated, remarked “Whoop!” and put a fifty-dollar bill in the plate.
Not to this day, with all the advance in intellectual advertising, has
there been seen a more arousing effort to sell salvation than Elmer’s
prose poem in the _Sparta World-Chronicle_ on a Saturday in December,
1919:
WOULD YOU LIKE YOUR MOTHER TO GO
BATHING WITHOUT STOCKINGS?
Do you believe in old-fashioned womanhood, that can love and
laugh and still be the symbols of God’s own righteousness,
bringing a tear to the eye as one remembers their brooding
tenderness? Would you like to see your own dear mammy indulging
in mixed bathing or dancing that Hell’s own fool monkeyshine,
the one-step?
REVEREND ELMER GANTRY
will answer these questions and others next Sunday morning.
Gantry shoots straight from the shoulder.
POPLAR AVENUE METHODIST CHURCH
Follow the crowd to the beautiful times
At the beautiful church with the beautiful chimes.
III
While he was in Sparta, national prohibition arrived, with its
high-colored opportunities for pulpit-orators, and in Sparta he was
inspired to his greatest political campaign.
The obviously respectable candidate for mayor of Sparta was a Christian
Business Man, a Presbyterian who was a manufacturer of rubber overshoes.
It is true that he was accused of owning the buildings in which were
several of the worst brothels and blind tigers in the city, but it had
amply been explained that the unfortunate gentleman had not been able to
kick out his tenants, and that he gave practically all his receipts from
the property to missionary work in China.
His opponent was a man in every way objectionable to Elmer’s principles:
a Jew, a radical who criticized the churches for not paying taxes, a
sensational and publicity-seeking lawyer who took the cases of labor
unions and negroes without fee. When he consulted them, Elmer’s Official
Board agreed that the Presbyterian was the only man to support. They
pointed out that the trouble with the radical Jew was that he was not
only a radical but a Jew.
Yet Elmer was not satisfied. He had, possibly, less objection to houses
of ill fame than one would have judged from his pulpit utterances, and
he certainly approved the Presbyterian’s position that “we must not try
dangerous experiments in government but adhere courageously to the
proven merits and economies of the present administration.” But talking
with members of his congregation, Elmer found that the Plain People—and
the plain, the very plain, people did make up such a large percentage of
his flock—hated the Presbyterian and had a surprised admiration for the
Jew.
“He’s awful’ kind to poor folks,” said they.
Elmer had what he called a “hunch.”
“All the swells are going to support this guy McGarry, but darned if I
don’t think the Yid’ll win, and anybody that roots for him’ll stand
ace-high after the election,” he reasoned.
He came out boisterously for the Jew. The newspapers squealed and the
Presbyterians bellowed and the rabbis softly chuckled.
Not only from his pulpit but in scattered halls Elmer campaigned and
thundered. He was smeared once with rotten eggs in a hall near the
red-light district, and once an illicit booze-dealer tried to punch his
nose, and that was a very happy time for Elmer.
The booze-dealer, a bulbous angry man, climbed up on the stage of the
hall and swayed toward Elmer, weaving with his fists, rumbling, “You
damn’ lying gospel-shark, I’ll show you—”
The forgotten star of the Terwillinger team leaped into life. He was
calm as in a scrimmage. He strode over, calculatingly regarded the point
of the bootlegger’s jaw, and caught him on it, exact. He saw the man
slumping down, but he did not stand looking; he swung back to the
reading-stand and went on speaking. The whole audience rose, clamorous
with applause, and Elmer Gantry had for a second become the most famous
man in town.
The newspapers admitted that he was affecting the campaign, and one of
them swung to his support. He was so strong on virtue and the purity of
womanhood and the evils of liquor that to oppose him was to admit one’s
self a debauchee.
At the business meeting of his church there was a stirring squabble over
his activities. When the leading trustee, a friend of the Presbyterian
candidate, declared that he was going to resign unless Elmer stopped, an
aged janitor shrieked, “And all the rest of us will resign unless the
Reverend keeps it up!” There was gleeful and unseemly applause, and
Elmer beamed.
The campaign grew so bellicose that reporters came up from the Zenith
newspapers; one of them the renowned Bill Kingdom of the Zenith
_Advocate-Times_. Elmer loved reporters. They quoted him on everything
from the Bible in the schools to the Armenian mandate. He was careful
not to call them “boys” but “gentlemen,” not to slap them too often on
the back; he kept excellent cigars for them; and he always said, “I’m
afraid I can’t talk to you as a preacher. I get too much of that on
Sunday. I’m just speaking as an ordinary citizen who longs to have a
clean city in which to bring up his kiddies.”
Bill Kingdom almost liked him, and the story about “the crusading
parson” which he sent up to the Zenith _Advocate-Times_—the Thunderer
of the whole state of Winnemac—was run on the third page, with a
photograph of Elmer thrusting out his fist as if to crush all the
sensualists and malefactors in the world.
Sparta papers reprinted the story and spoke of it with reverence.
The Jew won the campaign.
And immediately after this—six months before the Annual Conference of
1920—Bishop Toomis sent for Elmer.
IV
“At first I was afraid,” said the bishop, “you were making a great
mistake in soiling yourself in this Sparta campaign. After all, it’s our
mission to preach the pure gospel and the saving blood of Jesus, and not
to monkey with politics. But you’ve been so successful that I can
forgive you, and the time has come—— At the next Conference I shall
be able to offer you at last a church here in Zenith, and a very large
one, but with problems that call for heroic energy. It’s the old
Wellspring Church, down here on Stanley Avenue, corner of Dodsworth, in
what we call ‘Old Town.’ It used to be the most fashionable and useful
Methodist church in town, but the section has run down, and the
membership has declined from something like fourteen hundred to about
eight hundred, and under the present pastor—you know him—old Seriere,
fine noble Christian gentleman, great soul, but a pretty rotten
speaker—I don’t guess they have more than a hundred or so at morning
service. Shame, Elmer, wicked shame to see this great institution, meant
for the quickening of such vast multitudes of souls, declining and, by
thunder, not hardly giving a cent for missions! I wonder if you could
revive it? Go look it over, and the neighborhood, and let me know what
you think. Or whether you’d rather stay on in Sparta. You’ll get less
salary at Wellspring than you’re getting in Sparta—four thousand, isn’t
it?—but if you build up the church, guess the Official Board will
properly remunerate your labors.”
A church in Zenith! Elmer would—almost—have taken it with no salary
whatever. He could see his Doctor of Divinity degree at hand, his
bishopric or college presidency or fabulous pulpit in New York.
He found the Wellspring M. E. Church a hideous graystone hulk with
gravy-colored windows, and a tall spire ornamented with tin gargoyles
and alternate layers of tiles in distressing red and green. The
neighborhood had been smart, but the brick mansions, once leisurely
among lawns and gardens, were scabrous and slovenly, turned into
boarding-houses with delicatessen shops in the basements.
“Gosh, this section never will come back. Too many of the doggone _hoi
polloi_. Bunch of Wops. Nobody for ten blocks that would put more’n ten
cents in the collection. Nothing doing! I’m not going to run a
soup-kitchen and tell a bunch of dirty bums to come to Jesus. Not on
your life!”
But he saw, a block from the church, a new apartment-house, and near it
an excavation.
“Hm. Might come back, in apartments, at that. Mustn’t jump too quick.
Besides, these folks need the gospel just as much as the swell-headed
plutes out on Royal Ridge,” reflected the Reverend Mr. Gantry.
Through his old acquaintance, Gil O’Hearn of the O’Hearn House, Elmer
met a responsible contractor and inquired into the fruitfulness of the
Wellspring vineyard.
“Yes, they’re dead certain to build a bunch of apartment-houses, and
pretty good ones, in that neighborhood these next few years. Be a big
residential boom in Old Town. It’s near enough in to be handy to the
business section, and far enough from the Union Station so’s they
haven’t got any warehouses or wholesalers. Good buy, Reverend.”
“Oh, I’m not buying—I’m just selling—selling the gospel!” said the
Reverend, and he went to inform Bishop Toomis that after prayer and
meditation he had been led to accept the pastorate of the Wellspring
Church.
So, at thirty-nine, Cæsar came to Rome, and Rome heard about it
immediately.