To a passing policeman: “Say, excuse me, Cap’n, but could you tell me what that brick building is?”
“St. James’s Palace, sir. You’re an American? The Prince of Wales lives there, sir.”
“Is that a fact! D’you hear that, Cleo? Well, sir, that’s certainly something to remember!”
XI
When he regarded the meager audience at Brompton Road Chapel, Elmer had an inspiration.
All the way over he had planned to be poetic in his first London sermon. He was going to say that it was the strong man, the knight in armor, who was most willing to humble himself before God; and to say also that Love was the bow on life’s dark cloud, and the morning and evening star, both. But in a second of genius he cast it away, and reflected, “No! What they want is a good, pioneering, roughneck American!”
And that he was, splendidly.
“Folks,” he said, “it’s mighty nice of you to let a plain American come and bring his message to you. But I hope you don’t expect any Oxford College man. All I’ve got to give you—and may the dear Lord help my feebleness in giving you even that—is the message that God reigns among the grim frontiersmen of America, in cabin and trackless wild, even as he reigns here in your magnificent and towering city.
“It is true that just at the present moment, through no virtue of my own, I am the pastor of a church even larger than your beautiful chapel here. But, ah, I long for the day when the general superintendent will send me back to my own beloved frontier, to—Let me try, in my humble way, to give you a picture of the work I knew as a youth, that you may see how closely the grace of God binds your world-compelling city to the humblest vastnesses.
“I was the pastor—as a youngster, ignorant of everything save the fact that the one urgent duty of the preacher is to carry everywhere the Good News of the Atonement—of a log chapel in a frontier settlement called Schoenheim. I came at nightfall, weary and anhungered, a poor circuit-rider, to the house of Barney Bains, a pioneer, living all alone in his log cabin. I introduced myself. ‘I am Brother Gantry, the Wesleyan preacher,’ I said. Well, he stared at me, a wild look in his eyes, beneath his matted hair, and slowly he spoke:
“ ‘Brother,’ he said, ‘I ain’t seen no strangers for nigh onto a year, and I’m mighty pleased to see you.’
“ ‘You must have been awfully lonely, friend,’ I said.
“ ‘No, sir, not me!’ he said.
“ ‘How’s that?’ I said.
“ ‘Because Jesus has been with me all the time!’ ”
XII
They almost applauded.
They told him afterward that he was immense, and invited him to address them whenever he returned to London.
“Wait,” he reflected, “till I get back to Zenith and tell old Potts and Hickenlooper that!”
As they rode to the hotel on the bus, Cleo sighed, “Oh, you were wonderful! But I never knew you had such a wild time of it in your first pastorate.”
“Oh, well, it was nothing. A man that’s a real man has to take the rough with the smooth.”
“That’s so!”
XIII
He stood impatiently on a corner of the Rue de la Paix, while Cleo gaped into the window of a perfumer. (She was too well trained to dream of asking him to buy expensive perfume.) He looked at the façades in the Place Vendôme.
“Not much class—too kind of plain,” he decided.
A little greasy man edged up to him, covertly sliding toward him a pack of postcards, and whispered, “Lovely cards—only two francs each.”
“Oh,” said Elmer intelligently, “you speak English.”
“Sure. All language.”
Then Elmer saw the topmost card and he was galvanized.
“Whee! Golly! Two francs apiece?” He seized the pack, gloating—But Cleo was suddenly upon him, and he handed back the cards, roaring, “You get out of here or I’ll call a cop! Trying to sell obscene pictures—and to a minister of the gospel! Cleo, these Europeans have dirty minds!”
XIV
It was on the steamer home that he met and became intimate with J. E. North, the renowned vice-slayer, executive secretary of the National Association for the Purification of Art and the Press—affectionately known through all the evangelical world as “the Napap.” Mr. North was not a clergyman (though he was a warm Presbyterian layman), but no clergyman in the country had more furiously pursued wickedness, more craftily forced congressmen, through threats in their home districts, to see legislation in the same reasonable manner as himself. For several sessions of Congress he had backed a bill for a federal censorship of all fiction, plays, and moving pictures, with a penitentiary sentence for any author mentioning adultery even by implication, ridiculing prohibition, or making light of any Christian sect or minister.
The bill had always been defeated, but it was gaining more votes in every session. …
Mr. North was a tight-mouthed, thin gentleman. He liked the earnestness, uprightness, and vigor of the Reverend Dr. Gantry, and all day they walked the deck or sat talking—anywhere save in the smoking-room, where fools were befouling their intellects with beer. He gave Elmer an inside view of the great new world of organized opposition to immorality; he spoke intimately of the leaders of that world—the executives of the Anti-Saloon League, the Lord’s Day Alliance, the Watch and Ward Society, the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals—modern St. Johns, armed with card indices.
He invited Elmer to lecture for him.
“We need men like you, Dr. Gantry,” said Mr. North, “men with rigid standards of decency, and yet with a physical power which will indicate to the poor misguided youth of this awful flask-toting age that morality is not less but more virile than immorality. And I think your parishioners will appreciate your being invited to address gatherings in places like New York and Chicago now
