Elmer Gantry (14 page)

By Senior year he had read many of Dr. Zechlin’s bootlegged books: Davenport’s “Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals,”
which asserted that the shoutings and foamings and twitchings at revival meetings were no more sanctified than any other
barbaric religious frenzies, Dods and Sunderland on the origin of the Bible, which indicated that the Bible was no more holy
and infallible than Homer; Nathaniel Schmidt’s revolutionary life of Jesus, “The Prophet of Nazareth,” and White’s “History
of the Warfare of Science with Theology,” which painted religion as the enemy, not the promoter, of human progress. He was
indeed—in a Baptist seminary!—a specimen of the “young man ruined by godless education” whom the Baptist periodicals loved
to paint.

But he stayed.

He clung to the church. It was his land, his patriotism. Nebulously and quite unpractically and altogether miserably he
planned to give his life to a project called “liberalizing the church from within.”

It was a relief after his sophistries to have so lively an emotion as his sweet, clear, resounding hatred for Brother
Elmer Gantry.

Frank had always disliked Elmer’s thickness, his glossiness, his smut, and his inability to understand the most
elementary abstraction. But Frank was ordinarily no great hater, and when they went off together to guard the flock at
Schoenheim, he almost liked Elmer in his vigorous excitement—beautiful earthy excitement of an athlete.

Frank considered Lulu Bains a bisque doll, and he would have cherished her like any ten-year-old in his Sunday School
class. He saw Elmer’s whole body stiffen as he looked at Lulu. And there was nothing he could do.

He was afraid that if he spoke to Mr. Bains, or even to Lulu, in the explosion Elmer might have to marry her, and
suddenly the Frank who had always accepted “the holy institution of matrimony” felt that for a colt like Lulu any wild
kicking up of the heels would be better than being harnessed to Elmer’s muddy plow.

Frank’s minister father and his mother went to California for Christmas time, and he spent the holiday with Dr. Zechlin.
They two celebrated Christmas Eve, and a very radiant, well-contented, extremely German Weinachtsabend that was. Zechlin had
procured a goose, bullied the osteopath’s wife into cooking it, with sausages for stuffing and cranberry pancake to flank
it. He brewed a punch not at all Baptist; it frothed, and smelled divinely, and to Frank it brought visions.

They sat in old chairs on either side of the round stove, gently waving their punch glasses, and sang:

“Ah, yes,” the old man meditated, “that is the Christ I still dream of—the Child with shining hair, the dear German
Christ Child—the beautiful fairy tale—and your Dean Trospers make Jesus into a monster that hates youth and laughter—Wein,
Weib und Gesang. Der arme! How unlucky he was, that Christ, not to have the good Trosper with him at the wedding feast to
explain that he must not turn the water into wine. Chk! Chk! I wonder if I am too old to start a leetle farm with a big
vineyard and seven books?”

Elmer Gantry was always very witty about Dr. Bruno Zechlin. Sometimes he called him “Old Fuzzy.” Sometimes he said, “That
old coot OUGHT to teach Hebrew—he looks like a page of Yid himself.” Elmer could toss off things like that. The applause of
Eddie Fislinger, who was heard to say in hallways and lavatories that Zechlin lacked spirituality, encouraged Elmer to
create his masterpiece.

Before Exegesis class, he printed on the blackboard in a disguised hand:

“I am Fuzzy Zechlin, the gazabo that knows more than God. If Jake Trosper got onto what I really think about inspiration
of the Scriptures, he’d fire me out on my dirty Dutch neck.”

The assembling students guffawed, even ponderous Brother Karkis, the up-creek Calvin.

Dr. Zechlin trotted into the classroom, smiling. He read the blackboard inscription. He looked incredulous, then
frightened, and peered at his class like an old dog stoned by hoodlums. He turned and walked out, to the laughter of Brother
Gantry and Brother Karkis.

It is not recorded how the incident came to Dean Trosper.

He summoned Elmer. “I suspect it was you who wrote that on the blackboard.”

Elmer considered lying, then blurted, “Yes, I did, Dean. I tell you, it’s a shame—I don’t pretend to have reached a state
of Christian perfection, but I’m trying hard, and I think it’s a shame when a man on the faculty is trying to take away our
faith by hints and sneers, that’s how I feel.”

Dean Trosper spoke snappishly: “I don’t think you need worry about anybody suggesting new possibilities of sin to YOU,
Brother Gantry. But there is some justification to what you say. Now go and sin no more. I still believe that some day you
may grow up and turn your vitality into a means of grace for many, possibly including yourself. Thaddeldo.”

Dr. Bruno Zechlin was abruptly retired at Easter. He went to live with his niece. She was poor and liked bridge, and did
not want him. He made a little money by translating from the German. He died within two years.

Elmer Gantry never knew who sent him thirty dimes, wrapped in a tract about holiness, nor why. But he found the
sentiments in the tract useful in a sermon, and the thirty dimes he spent for lively photographs of burlesque ladies.

The relations of Brother Gantry and Brother Shallard were not ardent, toward Chrismastide, even in the intimacy of
pumping a hand-car.

Frank complained while they were laboring along the track after church at Schoenheim:

“Look here, Gantry, something’s got to be done. I’m not satisfied about you and Lulu. I’ve caught you looking at each
other. And I suspect you’ve been talking to the dean about Dr. Zechlin. I’m afraid I’ve got to go to the dean myself. You’re
not fit to have a pastorate.”

Elmer stopped pumping, glared, rubbed his mittened hands on his thighs, and spoke steadily:

“I’ve been waiting for this! I’m impulsive—sure; I make bad mistakes—every red-blooded man does. But what about you? I
don’t know how far you’ve gone with your hellish doubts, but I’ve been listening to the hedging way you answer questions in
Sunday School, and I know you’re beginning to wabble. Pretty soon you’ll be an out-and-out liberal. God! Plotting to weaken
the Christian religion, to steal away from weak groping souls their only hope of salvation! The worst murderer that ever
lived isn’t a criminal like you!”

“That isn’t true! I’d die before I’d weaken the faith of any one who needed it!”

“Then you simply haven’t got brains enough to see what you’re doing, and there’s no place for you in any Christian
pulpit! It’s me that ought to go to Pop Trosper complaining! Just today, when that girl came to you worrying about her pa’s
giving up family-prayers, you let on like it didn’t matter much. You may have started that poor young lady on the
doubt-paved road that leads to everlasting Hell!”

And all the way to Mizpah Frank worried and explained.

And at Mizpah Elmer graciously permitted him to resign his place at Schoenheim, and advised him to repent and seek the
direction of the Holy Spirit before he should ever attempt another pastorate.

Elmer sat in his rooms flaming with his evangelistic triumph. He was so sincere about it that not for minutes did he
reflect that Frank would no longer be an obstacle to his relations with Lulu Bains.

A score of times before March, in her own house, in an abandoned log barn, at the church, Elmer contrived to have
meetings with Lulu. But he wearied of her trusting babble. Even her admiration, since she always gushed the same things in
the same way, began to irritate him. Her love-making was equally unimaginative. She always kissed and expected to be kissed
in the same way. Even before March he had had enough, but she was so completely devoted to him that he wondered if he might
not have to give up the Schoenheim church to get rid of her. He felt injured.

Nobody could ever say he was unkind to girls or despised ’em, the way Jim Lefferts used to. He’d taught Lulu an awful
lot; got her over her hick ideas; showed her how a person could be religious and still have a good time, if you just looked
at it right and saw that while you ought to teach the highest ideals, nobody could be expected to always and exactly live up
to ’em every day. Especially when you were young. And hadn’t he given her a bracelet that cost five good bucks?

But she was such a darned fool. Never could understand that after a certain point a man wanted to quit love-making and
plan his next Sunday’s sermon or bone up on his confounded Greek. Practically, he felt resentfully, she’d deceived him. Here
he’d thought that she was a nice, safe, unemotional little thing, whom it might be pleasant to tease but who’d let him alone
when he had more serious matters to attend to, and then she’d turned out passionate. She wanted to go on being kissed and
kissed and kissed when he was sick of it. Her lips were always creeping around, touching his hand or his cheek when he
wanted to talk.

She sent him whining little notes at Mizpah. Suppose somebody found one of ’em! Golly! She wrote to him that she was just
living till their next meeting—trying to bother him and distract his attention when he had a man’s work to do. She mooned up
at him with her foolish soft mushy eyes all through his sermons— absolutely spoiled his style. She was wearing him out, and
he’d have to get rid of her.

Hated to do it. Always HAD been nice to girls—to everybody. But it was for her sake just as much as his—

He’d have to be mean to her and make her sore.

They were alone in the Schoenheim church after morning meeting. She had whispered to him at the door, “I’ve got something
I have to tell you.”

He was frightened; he grumbled, “Well, we oughtn’t to be seen together so much but—Slip back when the other folks are
gone.”

He was sitting in the front pew in the deserted church, reading hymns for want of better, when she crept behind him and
kissed his ear. He jumped.

“Good Lord, don’t go startling people like that!” he snarled. “Well, what’s all this you have to tell me?”

She was faltering, near to tears. “I thought you’d like it! I just wanted to creep close and say I loved you!”

“Well, good heavens, you needn’t of acted as though you were pregnant or something!”

“Elmer!” Too hurt in her gay affection, too shocked in her rustic sense of propriety, for resentment.

“Well, that’s just about how you acted! Making me wait here when I’ve got to be back in town—important meeting—and me
having to pump that hand-car all alone! I do wish you wouldn’t act like a ten-year-old kid ALL the time!”

“Elmer!”

“Oh, Elmer, Elmer, Elmer! That’s all very well. I like to play around and be foolish jus’ as well’s anybody, but all
this—all this—All the TIME!”

She fled round to the front of the pew and knelt by him, her childish hand on his knee, prattling in an imitation of
baby-talk which infuriated him:

“Oh, issums such cwoss old bear! Issums bad old bear! So cwoss with Lulukins!”

“Lulukins! Great John God!”

“Why, Elmer Gantry!” It was the Sunday School teacher who was shocked now. She sat up on her knees.

“Lulukins! Of all the damned fool baby-talk I ever heard that takes the cake! That’s got ’em all beat! For God’s sake try
to talk like a human being! And don’t go squatting there. Suppose somebody came in. Are you deliberately going to work to
ruin me? . . . LULUKINS!”

She stood up, fists tight. “What have I done? I didn’t mean to hurt you! Oh, I didn’t, dearest! Please forgive me! I just
came in to s’prise you!”

“Huh! You S’PRISED me all right!”

“Dear! Please! I’m so sorry. Why, you called me Lulukins yourself!”

“I never did!”

She was silent.

“Besides, if I did, I was kidding.”

Patiently, trying to puzzle it out, she sat beside him and pleaded, “I don’t know what I’ve done. I just don’t know.
Won’t you please—oh, PLEASE explain, and give me a chance to make up for it!”

“Oh, hell!” He sprang up, hat in hand, groping for his overcoat. “If you can’t understand, I can’t waste my time
explaining!” And was gone, relieved but not altogether proud.

But by Tuesday he admired himself for his resolution.

Tuesday evening came her apology; not a very good note, blurry, doubtful of spelling, and, as she had no notion what she
was apologizing about, not very lucid.

He did not answer it.

During his sermon the next Sunday she looked up at him waiting to smile, but he took care not to catch her eye.

While he was voluminously explaining the crime of Nadab and Abihu in putting strange fire in their censors, he was
thinking with self-admiration, “Poor little thing. I’m sorry for her. I really am.”

He saw that she was loitering at the door, behind her parents, after the service, but he left half his congregation
unhandshaken and unshriven, muttered to Deacon Bains, “Sorry gotta hurry ‘way,” and fled toward the railroad tracks.

“If you’re going to act this way and deliberately PERSECUTE me,” he raged, “I’ll just have to have a good talk with you,
my fine young lady!”

He waited, this new Tuesday, for another note of apology. There was none, but on Thursday, when he was most innocently
having a vanilla milk-shake at Bombery’s Drug Store, near the seminary, when he felt ever so good and benign and manly, with
his Missions theme all finished and two fine five-cent cigars in his pocket, he saw her standing outside peering in at
him.

He was alarmed. She looked not quite sane.

“Suppose she’s told her father!” he groaned.

He hated her.

He swaggered out gallantly, and he did most magniloquently the proper delight at encountering her here in town.

“Well, well, well, Lulu, this IS a pleasant surprise! And where’s Papa?”

“He and Ma are up in the doctor’s office—about Ma’s earache. I said I’d meet them at the Boston Bazaar. Elmer!” Her voice
was like stretched quivering wire. “I’ve GOT to talk to you! You’ve got to—Walk down the street with me.”

He saw that she had tried to rouge her cheeks. It was not customary in rural Midwest in 1906. She had done it badly.

The spring was early. These first days of March were soft with buds, and Elmer sighed that if she weren’t such a
tyrannical nagger, he might have felt romantic about her as they walked toward the court-house lawn and the statue of
General Sherman.

He had expanded her education in boldness as well as vocabulary; and with only a little hesitation, a little of peering
up at him, a little trying to hook her fingers over his arm till he shook it free, she blurted:

“We’ve got to do something. Because I think I’m going to have a baby.”

“Oh, good God Almighty! Hell!” said the Reverend Elmer Gantry. “And I suppose you’ve gone squealing to your old man and
the old woman!”

“No, I haven’t.” She was quiet, and dignified—dignified as a bedraggled gray kitten could be.

“Well, that’s good, anyway. Well, I suppose I’ll have to do something about it. Damn!”

He thought rapidly. From the ladies of joy whom he knew in the city of Monarch he could obtain information—But—

“You look here now!” he snarled. “It isn’t possible!” He faced her, on the brick walk through the court-house lawn, under
the castiron wings of the rusty Justice. “What are you trying to pull? God knows I most certainly intend to stand by you in
every way. But I don’t intend to be bamboozled, not by anybody! What makes you think you’re pregnant?”

“Please, dear! Don’t use that word!”

“Huh! Say, that’s pretty good, that is! Come across now. What makes you think so?”

She could not look at him; she looked only at the ground; and his virtuous indignation swooped down on her as she
stammered her reasons. Now no one had taught Lulu Bains much physiology; and it was evident that she was making up what she
considered sound symptoms. She could only mumble again and again, while tears mucked her clumsy rouge, while her bent
fingers trembled at her chin, “Oh, it’s—I feel so bad—oh, please, dear, don’t make me go on explaining.”

He had enough of it. He gripped her shoulder, not tenderly.

“Lulu, you’re lying! You have a dirty, lying, deceitful heart! I wondered what it was about you that bothered me and kept
me from marrying you. Now I know! Thank God I’ve found out in time! You’re lying!”

“Oh, dear, I’m not. Oh, please!”

“Look here. I’m going to take you to a doctor’s. Right now. We’ll get the truth.”

“Oh, no, no, no! Please, no! I can’t.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Oh, please!”

“Uh-huh! And that’s all you’ve got to say for yourself! Come here! Look up at me!”

They must have hurt, his meaty fingers digging into her shoulder, but then, he felt righteous, he felt like the Old
Testament prophets whom his sect admired. And he had found something about which he really could quarrel with her.

She did not look at him, for all his pinching. She merely wept, hopelessly.

“Then you were lying?”

“Oh, I was! Oh, dearest, how can you hurt me like you do?” He released his grip, and looked polite. “Oh, I don’t mean
hurting my shoulder. That doesn’t matter. I mean hurting ME! So cold to me! And I thought maybe if we were married—I’d do
everything to make you happy. I’d go wherever you did. I wouldn’t mind if we had the tiniest little small house—”

“And you—YOU—expect a minister of the gospel to share ANY house with a liar! Oh, you viper that—Oh, hell, I won’t talk
like a preacher. I don’t suppose I have done altogether right, maybe. Though I noticed you were glad enough to sneak out and
meet me places! But when a woman, a Christian, deliberately lies and tries to deceive a man in his deepest feelings—That’s
too much no matter what I did! Don’t you ever dare to speak to me again! And if you tell your father about this, and force
me into marriage, I’ll— I’ll—I’ll kill myself!”

“Oh, I won’t! Honest, I won’t!”

“I’ll repent my own fault in bitter tears and as for you, young woman—Go and sin no more.”

He swung round, walked away from her, deaf to her whimperings. She desperately trotted after his giant stride for a
while, then leaned against the trunk of a sycamore, while a passing grocery clerk snickered.

She did not appear at church the next Sunday. Elmer was so pleased that he thought of having another rendezvous with
her.

Deacon Bains and his good wife had noticed how pale and absent-minded was their normally bouncing daughter.

“Guess she’s in love with that new preacher. Well, let’s keep our hands off. Be a nice match for her. Never knew a young
preacher that was so filled with the power. Talks like a house afire, by golly,” said the deacon, as they yawned and
stretched in the vast billowy old bed.

Then Floyd Naylor came fretting to the deacon.

Floyd was a kinsman of the family; a gangling man of twenty-five, immensely strong, rather stupid, a poor farmer, very
loyal. For years he had buzzed about Lulu. It would be over-romantic to say that he had eaten his faithful heart out in lone
reverence. But he had always considered Lulu the most beautiful, sparkling, and profound girl in the universe. Lulu
considered him a stick, and Deacon Bains held in aversion his opinions on alfalfa. He was a familiar of the household;
rather like a neighbor’s dog.

Floyd found Deacon Bains in the barnyard mending a whiffletree, and grunted, “Say, Cousin Barney, I’m kind of worried
about Lulu.”

“Oh, guess she’s in love with this new preacher. Can’t tell; they might get hitched.”

“Yeh, but is Brother Gantry in love with her? Somehow I don’t like that fella.”

“Rats, you don’t appreciate preachers. You never was in a real state of grace. Never did get reborn of the spirit
proper.”

“Like hell I didn’t! Got just as reborn as you did! Preachers are all right, most of ’em. But this fella Gantry—Say, here
‘long about two months ago I seen him and Lulu walking down the brick schoolhouse road, and they was hugging and kissing
like all get-out, and he was calling her Sweetheart.”

“Heh? Sure it was them?”

“Dead certain. I was, uh—Well, fact is, another fella and me—”

“Who was she?”

“Now that don’t make no difference. Anyway, we was sitting right under the big maple this side of the schoolhouse, in the
shade, but it was bright moonlight and Lulu and this preacher come by, near’s I am to you, prett’ near. Well, thinks I,
guess they’re going to get engaged. Then I hung around the church, once-twice after meeting, and one time I kinda peeked in
the window and I seen ’em right there in the front pew, hugging like they sure ought to get married whether or no. I didn’t
say anything—wanted to wait and see if he’d marry her. Now it ain’t any of my business, Barney, but you know I always liked
Lulu, and strikes me we ought to know if this Bible-walloper is going to play straight with her.”

“Guess maybe that’s right. I’ll have a talk with her.”

Bains had never been very observant of his daughter, but Floyd Naylor was not a liar, and it was with sharpened eyes that
the deacon stumped into the house and found her standing by the churn, her arms hanging limp.

“Say, uh, say, uh, Lu, how’s things going with you and Brother Gantry?”

“Why, what do you mean?”

“You two engaged? Going to be engaged? He going to marry you?”

“Of course not.”

“Been making love to you, ain’t he?”

“Oh, never!”

“Never hugged you or kissed you?”

“Never!”

“How far’d he go?”

“Oh, he didn’t!”

“Why you been looking so kind of peeked lately?”

“Oh, I just don’t feel very well. Oh, I feel fine. It’s just the spring coming on, I guess—” She dropped to the floor
and, with her head against the churn, her thin fingers beating an hysterical tattoo on the floor, she choked with
weeping.

“There, there, Lu! Your dad’ll do something about it.”

Floyd was waiting in the farmyard.

There were, in those parts and those days, not infrequent ceremonies known as “shotgun weddings.”