“Gee, you might as well wear a gunnysack!” 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, adoring 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 the Banjo Valley Pioneer were startled to find among the notices to the effect that services would be held, as usual, at 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 recreation.”
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 storekeeper, 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.
