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 Houses.
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 guestroom, 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—yes, 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,
