“I’ll send you Brother Hudkins—a very fine preacher, living here now, retired. He’ll take the midnight train,” said Dean Trosper.
To the Mr. Hudkins the dean said, “And look around and see if you can find anything of Brother Gantry. I’m worried about him. The poor boy was simply in agony over a most unfortunate private matter … apparently.”
Now Mr. Hudkins had for several years conducted a mission on South Clark Street in Chicago, and he knew a good many unholy things. He had seen Elmer Gantry in classes at Mizpah. When he had finished Easter morning services in Monarch, he not only went to the police and to the hospitals but began a round of the hotels, restaurants, and bars. Thus it came to pass that while Elmer was merrily washing lobster down with California claret, stopping now and then to kiss the blonde beside him and (by request) to repeat his toast, that evening, he was being observed from the café door by the Reverend Mr. Hudkins in the enjoyable role of avenging angel.
V
When Elmer telephoned Eversley, Monday morning, to explain his sickness, the deacon snapped, “All right. Got somebody else.”
“But, well, say, Dean Trosper thought you and the committee might like to talk over a semipermanent arrangement—”
“Nope, nope, nope.”
Returned to Babylon, Elmer went at once to the office of the dean.
One look at his expression was enough.
The dean concluded two minutes of the most fluent descriptions with:
“—the faculty committee met this morning, and you are fired from Mizpah. Of course you remain an ordained Baptist minister. I could get your home association to cancel your credentials, but it would grieve them to know what sort of a lying monster they sponsored. Also, I don’t want Mizpah mixed up in such a scandal. But if I ever hear of you in any Baptist pulpit, I’ll expose you. Now I don’t suppose you’re bright enough to become a saloon-keeper, but you ought to make a pretty good bartender. I’ll leave your punishment to your midnight thoughts.”
Elmer whined, “You hadn’t ought—you ought not to talk to me like that! Doesn’t it say in the Bible you ought to forgive seventy times seven—”
“This is eighty times seven. Get out!”
So the Reverend Mr. Gantry surprisingly ceased to be, for practical purposes, a Reverend at all.
He thought of fleeing to his mother, but he was ashamed; of fleeing to Lulu, but he did not dare.
He heard that Eddie Fislinger had been yanked to Schoenheim to marry Lulu and Floyd Naylor … a lonely grim affair by lamplight.
“They might have ast me, anyway,” grumbled Elmer, as he packed.
He went back to Monarch and the friendliness of Ad Locust. He confessed that he had been a minister, and was forgiven. By Friday that week Elmer had become a traveling salesman for the Pequot Farm Implement Company.
Chapter XI
I
Elmer Gantry was twenty-eight and for two years he had been a traveling salesman for the Pequot Company.
Harrows and rakes and corn-planters; red plows and gilt-striped green wagons; catalogues and order-lists; offices glassed off from dim warehouses; shirt-sleeved dealers on high stools at high desks; the bar at the corner; stifling small hotels and lunchrooms; waiting for trains half the night in foul boxes of junction stations, where the brown slatted benches were an agony to his back; trains, trains, trains; trains and timetables and joyous return to his headquarters in Denver; a drunk, a theater, and service in a big church.
He wore a checked suit, a brown derby, striped socks, the huge ring of gold serpents and an opal which he had bought long ago, flower-decked ties, and what he called “fancy vests”—garments of yellow with red spots, of green with white stripes, of silk or daring chamois.
He had had a series of little loves, but none of them important enough to continue.
He was not unsuccessful. He was a good talker, a magnificent hand-shaker, his word could often be depended on, and he remembered most of the price-lists and all of the new smutty stories. In the office at Denver he was popular with “the boys.” He had one infallible “stunt”—a burlesque sermon. It was known that he had studied to be a preacher, but had courageously decided that it was no occupation for a “real two-fisted guy,” and that he had “told the profs where they got off.” A promising and commendable fellow; conceivably sales-manager some day.
Whatever his dissipations, Elmer continued enough exercise to keep his belly down and his shoulders up. He had been shocked by Deacon Bains’ taunt that he was growing soft, and every morning in his hotel room he unhumorously did calisthenics for fifteen minutes; evenings he bowled or boxed in Y.M.C.A. gymnasiums, or, in towns large enough, solemnly swam up and down tanks like a white porpoise. He felt lusty, and as strong as in Terwillinger days.
Yet Elmer was not altogether happy.
He appreciated being free of faculty rules, free of the guilt which in seminary days had followed his sprees at Monarch, free of the incomprehensible debates of Harry Zenz and Frank Shallard, yet he missed leading the old hymns, and the sound of his own voice, the sense of his own power, as he held an audience by his sermon. Always on Sunday evenings (except when he had an engagement with a waitress or a chambermaid) he went to the evangelical church nearest his hotel. He enjoyed criticizing the sermon professionally.
“Golly, I could put it all over that poor boob! The straight gospel is all right, but if he’d only stuck in a couple literary allusions, and lambasted the saloon-keepers more, he’d ’ve had ’em all het up.”
He sang so powerfully that despite a certain tobacco and whisky odor the parsons always shook hands with extra warmth, and said they were glad to see you with us this evening, Brother.
When he encountered really
