Luxuriously as a wayfarer drinking cool beer they caressed the phrases in linked sweetness long drawn out:
Strolling through the shaaaaady lanes, with your baby-mine,
You hold her hand and she holds yours, and that’s a very good sign
That she’s your tootsey-wootsey in the good old summer time.
Elmer wept a little, and blubbered, “Lez go out and start a scrap. You’re lil squirt, Jim. You get somebody to pick on you, and I’ll come along and knock his block off. I’ll show ’em!” His voice flared up. He was furious at the wrong about to be suffered. He arched his paws with longing to grasp the nonexistent scoundrel. “By God, I’ll knock the tar out of um! Nobody can touch my roommate! Know who I am? Elmer Gantry! Thash me! I’ll show um!”
The bartender was shuffling toward them, amiably ready for homicide.
“Shut up, Hellcat. What you need is ’nother drink. I’ll get ’nother drink,” soothed Jim, and Elmer slid into tears, weeping over the ancient tragic sorrows of one whom he remembered as Jim Lefferts.
Instantly, by some tricky sort of magic, there were two glasses in front of him. He tasted one, and murmured foolishly, “ ’Scuse me.” It was the chase, the water. But they couldn’t fool him! The whisky would certainly be in that other lil sawed-off glass. And it was. He was right, as always. With a smirk of self-admiration he sucked in the raw bourbon. It tickled his throat and made him feel powerful, and at peace with everyone save that fellow—he could not recall who, but it was someone whom he would shortly chastise, and after that float into an Elysium of benevolence.
The barroom was deliriously calming. The sour invigorating stench of beer made him feel healthy. The bar was one long shimmer of beauty—glowing mahogany, exquisite marble rail, dazzling glasses, curiously shaped bottles of unknown liqueurs, piled with a craftiness which made him very happy. The light was dim, completely soothing, coming through fantastic windows such as are found only in churches, saloons, jewelry shops, and other retreats from reality. On the brown plaster walls were sleek naked girls.
He turned from them. He was empty now of desire for women.
“That damn’ Juanita. Jus’ wants to get all she can out of you. That’s all,” he grumbled.
But there was an interesting affair beside him. A piece of newspaper sprang up, apparently by itself, and slid along the floor. That was a very funny incident, and he laughed greatly.
He was conscious of a voice which he had been hearing for centuries, echoing from a distant point of light and flashing through ever-widening corridors of a dream.
“We’ll get kicked out of here, Hellcat. Come on!”
He floated up. It was exquisite. His legs moved by themselves, without effort. They did a comic thing once—they got twisted and the right leg leaped in front of the left when, so far as he could make out, it should have been behind. He laughed, and rested against someone’s arm, an arm with no body attached to it, which had come out of the Ewigkeit to assist him.
Then unknown invisible blocks, miles of them, his head clearing, and he made grave announcement to a Jim Lefferts who suddenly seemed to be with him:
“I gotta lick that fellow.”
“All right, all right. You might as well go find a nice little fight and get it out of your system!”
Elmer was astonished; he was grieved. His mouth hung open and he drooled with sorrow. But still, he was to be allowed one charming fight, and he revived as he staggered industriously in search of it.
Oh, he exulted, it was a great party. For the first time in weeks he was relieved from the boredom of Terwillinger College.
II
Elmer Gantry, best known to classmates as Hellcat, had, this autumn of 1902, been football captain and led the best team Terwillinger College had known in ten years. They had won the championship of the East-middle Kansas Conference, which consisted of ten denominational colleges, all of them with buildings and presidents and chapel services and yells and colors and a standard of scholarship equal to the best high-schools. But since the last night of the football season, with the glorious bonfire in which the young gentlemen had burned up nine tar barrels, the sign of the Jew tailor, and the president’s tabby-cat, Elmer had been tortured by boredom.
He regarded basketball and gymnasium antics as light-minded for a football gladiator. When he had come to college, he had supposed he would pick up learnings of cash-value to a lawyer or doctor or insurance man—he had not known which he would become, and in his senior year, aged twenty-two this November, he still was doubtful. But this belief he found fallacious. What good would it be in the courtroom, or at the operating table, to understand trigonometry, or to know (as last spring, up to the examination on European History, he remembered having known) the date of Charlemagne? How much cash would it bring in to quote all that stuff—what the dickens was it now?—all that rot about “The world is too much around us, early and soon” from that old fool Wordsworth?
Punk, that’s what it was. Better be out in business. But still, if his mother claimed she was doing so well with her millinery business and wanted him to be a college graduate, he’d stick by it. Lot easier than pitching hay or carrying two-by-fours anyway.
Despite his invaluable voice, Elmer had not gone out for debating because of the irritating library-grinding, nor had he taken to prayer and moral eloquence in the Y.M.C.A., for with all the force of his simple and valiant nature he detested piety and admired drunkenness
