“These chumps would be astonished if they knew what I am!” he reflected.
After such an experience it was vexatious on Monday morning to talk with a droning implement-dealer about discounts on manure-spreaders; it was sickening to wait for train-time in a cuspidor-filled hotel lobby when he might have been in a church office superior with books, giving orders to pretty secretaries and being expansive and helpful to consulting sinners. He was only partly solaced by being able to walk openly into a saloon and shout, “Straight rye, Bill.”
On Sunday evening in a Western Kansas town he ambled to a shabby little church and read on the placard outside:
This Morning: The Meaning of Redemption
This Evening: Is Dancing of the Devil?
First Baptist Church
Pastor:
The Rev. Edward Fislinger, B.A., B.D.
“Oh, Gawd!” protested Elmer. “Eddie Fislinger! About the kind of burg he would land in! A lot he knows about the meaning of redemption or any other dogma, that human woodchuck! Or about dancing! If he’d ever been with me in Denver and shaken a hoof at Billy Portifero’s place, he’d have something to hand out. Fislinger—must be the same guy. I’ll sit down front and put his show on the fritz!”
Eddie Fislinger’s church was an octagonal affair, with the pulpit in one angle, an arrangement which produced a fascinating, rather dizzy effect, reminiscent of the doctrine of predestination. The interior was of bright yellow, hung with many placards: “Get Right With God,” and “Where Will You Spend Eternity?” and “The Wisdom of This World is Foolishness with God.” The Sunday School Register behind the pulpit communicated the tidings that the attendance today had been forty-one, as against only thirty-nine last week, and the collection eighty-nine cents, as against only seventy-seven.
The usher, a bricklayer in a clean collar, was impressed by Elmer’s checked suit and starched red-speckled shirt and took him to the front row.
Eddie flushed most satisfactorily when he saw Elmer from the pulpit, started to bow, checked it, looked in the general direction of Heaven, and tried to smile condescendingly. He was nervous at the beginning of his sermon, but apparently he determined that his attack on sin—which hitherto had been an academic routine with no relation to any of his appallingly virtuous flock—might be made real. With his squirrel-toothed and touching earnestness he looked down at Elmer and as good as told him to go to hell and be done with it. But he thought better of it, and concluded that God might be able to give even Elmer Gantry another chance if Elmer stopped drinking, smoking, blaspheming, and wearing checked suits. (If he did not refer to Elmer by name, he certainly did by poisonous glances.)
Elmer was angry, then impressively innocent, then bored. He examined the church and counted the audience—twenty-seven excluding Eddie and his wife. (There was no question but that the young woman looking adoringly up from the front pew was Eddie’s consort. She had the pitifully starved and home-tailored look of a preacher’s wife.) By the end of the sermon, Elmer was being sorry for Eddie. He sang the closing hymn, “He’s the Lily of the Valley,” with a fine unctuous grace, coming down powerfully on the jubilant “Hallelujah,” and waited to shake hands with Eddie forgivingly.
“Well, well, well,” they both said; and “What are you doing in these parts?” and Eddie: “Wait till everybody’s gone—must have a good old-fashioned chin with you, old fellow!”
As he walked with the Fislingers to the parsonage, a block away, and sat with them in the living-room, Elmer wanted to be a preacher again, take the job away from Eddie and do it expertly; yet he was repulsed by the depressing stinginess of Eddie’s life. His own hotel bedrooms were drab enough, but they were free of nosey parishioners, and they were as luxurious as this parlor with its rain-blotched ceiling, bare pine floor, sloping chairs, and perpetual odor of diapers. There were already, in two years of Eddie’s marriage, two babies, looking as though they were next-door to having been conceived without sin; and there was a perfectly blank-faced sister-in-law who cared for the children during services.
Elmer wanted to smoke, and for all his training in the eternal mysteries he could not decide whether it would be more interesting to annoy Eddie by smoking or to win him by refraining.
He smoked, and wished he hadn’t.
Eddie noticed it, and his reedy wife noticed it, and the sister-in-law gaped at it, and they labored at pretending they hadn’t.
Elmer felt large and sophisticated and prosperous in their presence, like a city broker visiting a farmer cousin and wondering which of his tales of gilded towers would be simple enough for belief.
Eddie gave him the news of Mizpah. Frank Shallard had a small church in a town called Catawba, the other end of the state of Winnemac from the seminary. There had been some difficulty over his ordination, for he had been shaky about even so clear and proven a fact as the virgin birth. But his father and Dean Trosper had vouched for him, and Frank had been ordained. Harry Zenz had a large church in a West Virginia mining town. Wallace Umstead, the physical instructor, was “doing fine” in the Y.M.C.A. Professor Bruno Zechlin was dead, poor fellow.
“Whatever became of Horace Carp?” asked Elmer.
“Well, that’s the strangest thing of all. Horace’s gone into the Episcopal Church, like he always said he would.”
“Well, well, zatta fact!”
“Yes-sir, his father died just after he graduated, and he up and turned Episcopalian and took a year in General, and now they say he’s doing pretty good, and he’s high-church as all get-out.”
“Well, you seem to have a good thing of it here, Eddie. Nice church.”
“Well, it
