“That’s the idea, Mannie.”
“Well, maybe you’re right. Now if you’ll give me the two hundred bucks, I’ll see these birds are out of town tonight, and maybe I’ll give ’em some of the two hundred.”
“Maybe!” said Mr. Rigg.
“Maybe!” said Mr. Silverhorn.
“God!” cried Elmer Gantry, and suddenly he was disgracing himself with tears.
That was Saturday morning.
IV
The afternoon papers had front-page stories reproducing Hettie’s confession, joyfully announcing Elmer’s innocence, recounting his labors for purity, and assaulting the booze interests which had bribed this poor, weak, silly girl to attack Elmer.
Before eight on Sunday morning, telegrams had come in from the Yorkville Methodist Church and the Napap, congratulating Elmer, asserting that they had never doubted his innocence, and offering him the pastorate of Yorkville and the executive secretaryship of the Napap.
V
When the papers had first made charges against Elmer, Cleo had said furiously, “Oh, what a wicked, wicked lie—darling, you know I’ll stand back of you!” but his mother had crackled, “Just how much of this is true, Elmy? I’m getting kind of sick and tired of your carryings on!”
Now, when he met them at Sunday breakfast, he held out the telegrams, and the two women elbowed each other to read them.
“Oh, my dear, I am so glad and proud!” cried Cleo; and Elmer’s mother—she was an old woman, and bent; very wretched she looked as she mumbled, “Oh, forgive me, my boy! I’ve been as wicked as that Dowler woman!”
VI
But for all that, would his congregation believe him?
If they jeered when he faced them, he would be ruined, he would still lose the Yorkville pastorate and the Napap. Thus he fretted in the quarter-hour before morning service, pacing his study and noting through the window—for once, without satisfaction—that hundreds on hundreds were trying to get into the crammed auditorium.
His study was so quiet. How he missed Hettie’s presence!
He knelt. He did not so much pray as yearn inarticulately. But this came out clearly: “I’ve learned my lesson. I’ll never look at a girl again. I’m going to be the head of all the moral agencies in the country—nothing can stop me, now I’ve got the Napap!—but I’m going to be all the things I want other folks to be! Never again!”
He stood at his study door, watching the robed choir filing out to the auditorium chanting. He realized how he had come to love the details of his church; how, if his people betrayed him now, he would miss it: the choir, the pulpit, the singing, the adoring faces.
It had come. He could not put it off. He had to face them.
Feebly the Reverend Dr. Gantry wavered through the door to the auditorium and exposed himself to twenty-five hundred question marks.
They rose and cheered—cheered—cheered. Theirs were the shining faces of friends.
Without planning it, Elmer knelt on the platform, holding his hands out to them, sobbing, and with him they all knelt and sobbed and prayed, while outside the locked glass door of the church, seeing the mob kneel within, hundreds knelt on the steps of the church, on the sidewalk, all down the block.
“Oh, my friends!” cried Elmer, “do you believe in my innocence, in the fiendishness of my accusers? Reassure me with a hallelujah!”
The church thundered with the triumphant hallelujah, and in a sacred silence Elmer prayed:
“O Lord, thou hast stooped from thy mighty throne and rescued thy servant from the assault of the mercenaries of Satan! Mostly we thank thee because thus we can go on doing thy work, and thine alone! Not less but more zealously shall we seek utter purity and the prayer-life, and rejoice in freedom from all temptations!”
He turned to include the choir, and for the first time he saw that there was a new singer, a girl with charming ankles and lively eyes, with whom he would certainly have to become well acquainted. But the thought was so swift that it did not interrupt the paean of his prayer:
“Let me count this day, Lord, as the beginning of a new and more vigorous life, as the beginning of a crusade for complete morality and the domination of the Christian church through all the land. Dear Lord, thy work is but begun! We shall yet make these United States a moral nation!”
Colophon
Elmer Gantry
was published in 1927 by
Sinclair Lewis.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
B. Timothy Keith,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2003 by
Don Lainson
for
Project Gutenberg Australia
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Lyman Beecher,
a painting completed in 1842 by
James Henry Beard.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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Uncopyright
May you do good and not evil.
May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
May you share freely, never taking more than you give.
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