“If you could see the way my cookstove’s broken and the sink needs painting,” said Mrs. Fislinger—her chief utterance of the evening.
Elmer felt choked and imprisoned. He escaped. At the door Eddie held both his hands and begged, “Oh, Elm, I’ll never give up till I’ve brought you back! I’m going to pray. I’ve seen you under conviction. I know what you can do!”
Fresh air, a defiant drink of rye, loud laughter, taking a train—Elmer enjoyed it after this stuffiness. Already Eddie had lost such devout fires as he had once shown in the Y.M.C.A.: Already he was old, settled down, without conceivable adventure, waiting for death.
Yet Eddie had said—
Startled, he recalled that he was still a Baptist minister! For all of Trosper’s opposition, he could preach. He felt with superstitious discomfort, Eddie’s incantation, “I’ll never give up till I’ve brought you back.”
And—just to take Eddie’s church and show what he could do with it! By God he’d bring those hicks to time and make ’em pay up!
He flitted across the state to see his mother.
His disgrace at Mizpah had, she said, nearly killed her. With tremulous hope she now heard him promise that maybe when he’d seen the world and settled down, he might go back into the ministry.
In a religious mood (which fortunately did not prevent his securing some telling credit-information by oiling a bookkeeper with several drinks) he came to Sautersville, Nebraska, an ugly, enterprising, industrial town of 20,000. And in that religious mood he noted the placards of a woman evangelist, one Sharon Falconer, a prophetess of whom he had heard.
The clerk in the hotel, the farmers about the implement warehouse, said that Miss Falconer was holding union meetings in a tent, with the support of most of the Protestant churches in town; they asserted that she was beautiful and eloquent, that she took a number of assistants with her, that she was “the biggest thing that ever hit this burg,” that she was comparable to Moody, to Gipsy Smith, to Sam Jones, to J. Wilbur Chapman, to this new baseball evangelist, Billy Sunday.
“That’s nonsense. No woman can preach the gospel,” declared Elmer, as an expert.
But he went, that evening, to Miss Falconer’s meeting.
The tent was enormous; it would seat three thousand people, and another thousand could be packed in standing-room. It was nearly filled when Elmer arrived and elbowed his majestic way forward. At the front of the tent was an extraordinary structure, altogether different from the platform-pulpit-American-flag arrangement of the stock evangelist. It was a pyramidal structure, of white wood with gilded legs, affording three platforms; one for the choir, one higher up for a row of seated local clergy; and at the top a small platform with a pulpit shaped like a shell and painted like a rainbow. Swarming over it all were lilies, roses and vines.
“Great snakes! Regular circus layout! Just what you’d expect from a fool woman evangelist!” decided Elmer.
The top platform was still unoccupied; presumably it was to set off the charms of Miss Sharon Falconer.
The mixed choir, with their gowns and mortarboards, chanted “Shall We Gather at the River?” A young man, slight, too good-looking, too arched of lip, wearing a priest’s waistcoat and collar turned round, read from Acts at a stand on the second platform. He was an Oxonian, and it was almost the first time that Elmer had heard an Englishman read.
“Huh! Willy-boy, that’s what he is! This outfit won’t get very far. Too much skirts. No punch. No good old-fashioned gospel to draw the customers,” scoffed Elmer.
A pause. Everyone waited, a little uneasy. Their eyes went to the top platform. Elmer gasped. Coming from some refuge behind the platform, coming slowly, her beautiful arms outstretched to them, appeared a saint. She was young, Sharon Falconer, surely not thirty, stately, slender and tall; and in her long slim face, her black eyes, her splendor of black hair, was rapture or boiling passion. The sleeves of her straight white robe, with its ruby girdle, were slashed, and fell away from her arms as she drew everyone to her.
“God!” prayed Elmer Gantry, and that instant his planless life took on plan and resolute purpose. He was going to have Sharon Falconer.
Her voice was warm, a little husky, desperately alive.
“Oh, my dear people, my dear people, I am not going to preach tonight—we are all so weary of nagging sermons about being nice and good! I am not going to tell that you’re sinners, for which of us is not a sinner? I am not going to explain the Scriptures. We are all bored by tired old men explaining the Bible through their noses! No! We are going to find the golden Scriptures written in our own hearts, we are going to sing together, laugh together, rejoice together like a gathering of April brooks, rejoice that in us is living the veritable spirit of the Everlasting and Redeeming Christ Jesus!”
Elmer never knew what the words were, or the sense—if indeed anyone knew. It was all caressing music to him, and at the end, when she ran down curving flower-wreathed stairs to the lowest platform and held out her arms, pleading with them to find peace in salvation, he was aroused to go forward with the converts, to kneel in the writhing row under the blessing of her extended hands.
But he was lost in no mystical ecstasy. He was the critic, moved by the play but
