Chapter XXXI
I
For over a year now it had been murmured through the church-world that no speaker was more useful to the reform organization than the Rev. Dr. Elmer Gantry of Zenith. His own church regretted losing his presence so often, but they were proud to hear of him as speaking in New York, in Los Angeles, in Toronto.
It was said that when Mr. J. E. North retired from the Napap because of the press of his private interests (he was the owner of the Eppsburg, N.Y., Times-Scimitar), Dr. Gantry would be elected executive secretary of the Napap in his stead. It was said that no one in America was a more relentless foe of so-called liberalism in theology and of misconduct in private life.
It was said that Dr. Gantry had refused support for election as a bishop at the 1928 General Conference of the Methodist Church, North, two years from now. And it was definitely known that he had refused the presidency of Swenson University in Nebraska.
But it was also definitely known, alas, that he was likely to be invited to take the pastorate of the Yorkville Methodist Church in New York City, which included among its members Dr. Wilkie Bannister, that resolute cover-to-cover fundamentalist who was also one of the most celebrated surgeons in the country, Peter F. Durbar, the oil millionaire, and Jackie Oaks, the musical-comedy clown. The bishop of the New York area was willing to give Dr. Gantry the appointment. But—Well, there were contradictory stories; one version said that Dr. Gantry had not decided to take the Yorkville appointment; the other said that Yorkville, which meant Dr. Bannister, had not decided to take Dr. Gantry. Anyway, the Wellspring flock hoped that their pastor, their spiritual guardian, their friend and brother, would not leave them.
II
After he had discharged Miss Bundle, the church secretary—and that was a pleasant moment; she cried so ludicrously—Elmer had to depend on a series of incapable girls, good Methodists but rotten stenographers.
It almost made him laugh to think that while everybody supposed he was having such a splendid time with his new fame, he was actually running into horrible luck. This confounded J. E. North, with all his pretenses of friendship, kept delaying his resignation from the Napap. Dr. Wilkie Bannister, the conceited chump—a fellow who thought he knew more about theology than a preacher!—delayed in advising the Official Board of the Yorkville Church to call Elmer. And his secretaries infuriated him. One of them was shocked when he said just the least little small “damn”!
Nobody appreciated the troubles of a man destined to be the ruler of America; no one knew what he was sacrificing in his campaign for morality.
And how tired he was of the rustic and unimaginative devotion of Lulu Bains! If she lisped “Oh, Elmer, you are so strong!” just once more, he’d have to clout her!
III
In the cue of people who came up after the morning service to shake hands with the Reverend Dr. Gantry was a young woman whom the pastor noted with interest.
She was at the end of the cue, and they talked without eavesdroppers.
If a Marquis of the seventeenth century could have been turned into a girl of perhaps twenty-five, completely and ardently feminine yet with the haughty head, the slim hooked nose, the imperious eyes of M. le Marquis, that would have been the woman who held Elmer’s hand, and said:
“May I tell you, Doctor, that you are the first person in my whole life who has given me a sense of reality in religion?”
“Sister, I am very grateful,” said the Reverend Dr. Gantry, while Elmer was saying within, “Say, you’re a kid I’d like to get acquainted with!”
“Dr. Gantry, aside from my tribute—which is quite genuine—I have a perfectly unscrupulous purpose in coming and speaking to you. My name is Hettie Dowler—Miss, unfortunately! I’ve had two years in the University of Wisconsin. I’ve been secretary of Mr. Labenheim of the Tallahassee Life Insurance Company for the last year, but he’s been transferred to Detroit. I’m really quite a good secretary. And I’m a Methodist—a member of Central, but I’ve been planning to switch to Wellspring. Now what I’m getting at is: If you should happen to need a secretary in the next few months—I’m filling in as one of the hotel stenographers at the Thornleigh—”
They looked at each other, unswerving, comprehending. They shook hands again, more firmly.
“Miss Dowler, you’re my secretary right now,” said Elmer. “It’ll take about a week to arrange things.”
“Thank you.”
“May I drive you home?”
“I’d love to have you.”
IV
Not even the nights when they worked together, alone in the church, were more thrilling than their swift mocking kisses between the calls of solemn parishioners. To be able to dash across the study and kiss her soft temple after a lugubrious widow had waddled out, and to have her whisper, “Darling, you were too wonderful with that awful old hen; oh, you are so dear!”—that was life to him.
He went often of an evening to Hettie Dowler’s flat—a pleasant white-and-blue suite in one of the new apartment hotels, with an absurd kitchenette and an electric refrigerator. She curled, in long leopard-like lines, on the damask couch, while he marched up and down rehearsing his sermons and stopped for the applause of her kiss.
Always he slipped down to the pantry at his house and telephoned good night to her before retiring, and when she was kept home by illness he telephoned to her from his study every hour or scrawled notes to her. That she liked best. “Your letters are so dear and funny and sweet,” she told him. So he wrote in his unformed script:
Dearest ittle honeykins bunnykins, oo is such a darlings, I adore you, I haven’t
