“Elmer!”
“Oh, Elmer, Elmer, Elmer! That’s all very well. I like to play around and be foolish jus’ as well’s anybody, but all this—all this—All the time!”
She fled round to the front of the pew and knelt by him, her childish hand on his knee, prattling in an imitation of babytalk which infuriated him:
“Oh, issums such cwoss old bear! Issums bad old bear! So cwoss with Lulukins!”
“Lulukins! Great John God!”
“Why, Elmer Gantry!” It was the Sunday School teacher who was shocked now. She sat up on her knees.
“Lulukins! Of all the damned fool babytalk I ever heard that takes the cake! That’s got ’em all beat! For God’s sake try to talk like a human being! And don’t go squatting there. Suppose somebody came in. Are you deliberately going to work to ruin me? … Lulukins!”
She stood up, fists tight. “What have I done? I didn’t mean to hurt you! Oh, I didn’t, dearest! Please forgive me! I just came in to s’prise you!”
“Huh! You s’prised me all right!”
“Dear! Please! I’m so sorry. Why, you called me Lulukins yourself!”
“I never did!”
She was silent.
“Besides, if I did, I was kidding.”
Patiently, trying to puzzle it out, she sat beside him and pleaded, “I don’t know what I’ve done. I just don’t know. Won’t you please—oh, please explain, and give me a chance to make up for it!”
“Oh, hell!” He sprang up, hat in hand, groping for his overcoat. “If you can’t understand, I can’t waste my time explaining!” And was gone, relieved but not altogether proud.
But by Tuesday he admired himself for his resolution.
Tuesday evening came her apology; not a very good note, blurry, doubtful of spelling, and, as she had no notion what she was apologizing about, not very lucid.
He did not answer it.
During his sermon the next Sunday she looked up at him waiting to smile, but he took care not to catch her eye.
While he was voluminously explaining the crime of Nadab and Abihu in putting strange fire in their censors, he was thinking with self-admiration, “Poor little thing. I’m sorry for her. I really am.”
He saw that she was loitering at the door, behind her parents, after the service, but he left half his congregation unhandshaken and unshriven, muttered to Deacon Bains, “Sorry gotta hurry ’way,” and fled toward the railroad tracks.
“If you’re going to act this way and deliberately persecute me,” he raged, “I’ll just have to have a good talk with you, my fine young lady!”
He waited, this new Tuesday, for another note of apology. There was none, but on Thursday, when he was most innocently having a vanilla milkshake at Bombery’s Drug Store, near the seminary, when he felt ever so good and benign and manly, with his Missions theme all finished and two fine five-cent cigars in his pocket, he saw her standing outside peering in at him.
He was alarmed. She looked not quite sane.
“Suppose she’s told her father!” he groaned.
He hated her.
He swaggered out gallantly, and he did most magniloquently the proper delight at encountering her here in town.
“Well, well, well, Lulu, this is a pleasant surprise! And where’s Papa?”
“He and Ma are up in the doctor’s office—about Ma’s earache. I said I’d meet them at the Boston Bazaar. Elmer!” Her voice was like stretched quivering wire. “I’ve got to talk to you! You’ve got to—Walk down the street with me.”
He saw that she had tried to rouge her cheeks. It was not customary in rural Midwest in 1906. She had done it badly.
The spring was early. These first days of March were soft with buds, and Elmer sighed that if she weren’t such a tyrannical nagger, he might have felt romantic about her as they walked toward the courthouse lawn and the statue of General Sherman.
He had expanded her education in boldness as well as vocabulary; and with only a little hesitation, a little of peering up at him, a little trying to hook her fingers over his arm till he shook it free, she blurted:
“We’ve got to do something. Because I think I’m going to have a baby.”
“Oh, good God Almighty! Hell!” said the Reverend Elmer Gantry. “And I suppose you’ve gone squealing to your old man and the old woman!”
“No, I haven’t.” She was quiet, and dignified—dignified as a bedraggled gray kitten could be.
“Well, that’s good, anyway. Well, I suppose I’ll have to do something about it. Damn!”
He thought rapidly. From the ladies of joy whom he knew in the city of Monarch he could obtain information—But—
“You look here now!” he snarled. “It isn’t possible!” He faced her, on the brick walk through the courthouse lawn, under the cast-iron wings of the rusty Justice. “What are you trying to pull? God knows I most certainly intend to stand by you in every way. But I don’t intend to be bamboozled, not by anybody! What makes you think you’re pregnant?”
“Please, dear! Don’t use that word!’ ”
“Huh! Say, that’s pretty good, that is! Come across now. What makes you think so?”
She could not look at him; she looked only at the ground; and his virtuous indignation swooped down on her as she stammered her reasons. Now no one had taught Lulu Bains much physiology; and it was evident that she was making up what she considered sound symptoms. She could only mumble again and again, while tears mucked her clumsy rouge, while her bent fingers trembled at her chin, “Oh, it’s—I feel so bad—oh, please, dear, don’t make me go on explaining.”
He had enough of it. He gripped her shoulder, not tenderly.
“Lulu, you’re lying! You have a dirty, lying, deceitful heart! I wondered what it was about you that bothered me and kept me from marrying you. Now I know! Thank God I’ve found out in time! You’re lying!”
“Oh, dear, I’m not. Oh, please!”
“Look here. I’m going to take you to a doctor’s. Right
