Vice was ended in Zenith. It was thirty days before any of the gay ladies were really back at work—though the gentlemanly jailers at the workhouse did let some of them out for an occasional night.
Every Sunday evening now people were turned from the door of Elmer’s church. If they did not always have a sermon about vice, at least they enjoyed the saxophone solos, and singing “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” And once they were entertained by a professional juggler who wore (it was Elmer’s own idea) a placard proclaiming that he stood for “God’s Word” and who showed how easy it was to pick up weights symbolically labeled “Sin” and “Sorrow” and “Ignorance” and “Papistry.”
The trustees were discussing the erection of a new and much larger church, a project for which Elmer himself had begun to prepare a year before, by reminding the trustees how many new apartment-houses were replacing the rundown residences in Old Town.
The trustees raised his salary to five thousand, and they increased the budget for institutional work. Elmer did not institute so many clubs for students of chiropractic and the art of motion-picture acting as did Dr. Otto Hickenlooper of Central Methodist, but there was scarcely an hour from nine in the morning till ten at night when some circle was not trying to do good to somebody … and even after ten there were often Elmer and Lulu Bains Naylor, conferring on cooking classes.
Elmer had seen the danger of his crusading publicity and his Lively Sunday Evenings—the danger of being considered a clown instead of a great moral leader.
“I’ve got to figure out some way so’s I keep dignified and yet keep folks interested,” he meditated. “The thing is sort of to have other people do the monkey-business, but me, I got to be upstage and not smile as much as I’ve been doing. And just when the poor chumps think my Sunday evening is nothing but a vaudeville show, I’ll suddenly soak ’em with a regular old-time hellfire and damnation sermon, or be poetic and that stuff.”
It worked, reasonably. Though many of his rival preachers in Zenith went on calling him “clown” and “charlatan” and “sensationalist,” no one could fail to appreciate his lofty soul and his weighty scholarship, once they had seen him stand in agonized silent prayer, then level his long forefinger and intone:
“You have laughed now. You have sung. You have been merry. But what came ye forth into the wilderness for to see? Merely laughter? I want you to stop a moment now and think just how long it is since you have realized that any night death may demand your souls, and that then, laughter or no laughter, unless you have found the peace of God, unless you have accepted Christ Jesus as your savior, you may with no chance of last-minute repentance be hurled into horrible and shrieking and appalling eternal torture!”
Elmer had become so distinguished that the Rotary Club elected him to membership with zeal.
The Rotary Club was an assemblage of accountants, tailors, osteopaths, university-presidents, carpet-manufacturers, advertising men, millinery-dealers, ice-dealers, piano salesmen, laundrymen, and like leaders of public thought, who met weekly for the purposes of lunching together, listening to addresses by visiting actors and by lobbyists against the recognition of Russia, beholding vaudeville teams in eccentric dances, and indulging in passionate rhapsodies about Service and Business Ethics. They asserted that their one desire in their several callings was not to make money but only to serve and benefit a thing called the Public. They were as earnest about this as was the Reverend Elmer Gantry about vice.
He was extraordinarily at home among the Rotarians; equally happy in being a good fellow with such good fellows as these and in making short speeches to the effect that “Jesus Christ would be a Rotarian if he lived today—Lincoln would be a Rotarian today—William McKinley would be a Rotarian today. All these men preached the principles of Rotary: one for all and all for one; helpfulness towards one’s community, and respect for God.”
It was a rule of this organization, which was merry and full of greetings in between inspirational addresses, that everyone should, at lunch, be called by his first name. They shouted at the Reverend Mr. Gantry as “Elmer” or “Elm,” while he called his haberdasher “Ike” and beamed on his shoe-seller as “Rudy.” A few years before, this intimacy might have led him into indiscretions, into speaking vulgarly, or even desiring a drink. But he had learned his role of dignity now, and though he observed, “Dandy day, Shorty!” he was quick to follow it up unhesitatingly with an orotund, “I trust that you have been able to enjoy the beauty of the vernal foliage in the country this week.” So Shorty and his pals went up and down informing the citizenry that Reverend Gantry was a “good scout, a prince of a good fellow, but a mighty deep thinker, and a real honest-to-God orator.”
When Elmer informed T. J. Rigg of the joys of Rotary, the lawyer scratched his chin and suggested, “Fine. But look here, Brother Elmer. There’s one thing you’re neglecting: the really big boys with the long pockets. Got to know ’em. Not many of ’em Methodists—they go out for Episcopalianism or Presbyterianism or Congregationalism or Christian Science, or stay out of the church altogether. But that’s no reason why we can’t turn their money Methodist. You wouldn’t find but mighty few of these Rotarians in the Tonawanda Country Club—into which I bought my way by blackmailing, you might say, a wheat speculator.”
“But—but—why, T. J., those Rotarians—why there’s fellows in there like Ira Runyon, the managing editor of the Advocate, and Win Grant, the realtor—”
“Yeh, but the owner of the Advocate, and the banker that’s letting Win Grant run
