There were ever so many ecclesiastical bodies who answered that they didn’t see why he waited even till midnight, but if they were thus intimidated into signing the contract (an excellent contract, drawn up by a devout Christian Scientist lawyer named Finkelstein) they were the more prepared to give spiritual and financial support to Sharon’s labors when she did arrive.
The new press-agent was finally so impressed by the beauties of evangelism, as contrasted with his former circuses and real estate, that he was himself converted, and sometimes when he was in town with the troupe, he sang in the choir and spoke to Y.M.C.A. classes in journalism. But even Elmer’s arguments could never get him to give up a sturdy, plodding devotion to poker.
III
The contract signed, the advance-man remembered his former newspaper labors, and for a few days became touchingly friendly with all the reporters in town. There were late parties at his hotel; there was much sending of bellboys for more bottles of Wilson and White Horse and Green River. The press-agent admitted that he really did think that Miss Falconer was the greatest woman since Sarah Bernhardt, and he let the boys have stories, guaranteed held exclusive, of her beauty, the glories of her family, her miraculous power of fetching sinners or rain by prayer, and the rather vaguely dated time when, as a young girl, she had been recognized by Dwight Moody as his successor.
South of the Mason and Dixon line her grandfather was merely Mr. Falconer, a bellicose and pious man, but far enough north he was General Falconer of Ole Virginny—preferably spelled that way—who had been the adviser and solace of General Robert E. Lee. The press-agent also wrote the posters for the Ministerial Alliance, giving Satan a generous warning as to what was to happen to him.
So when Sharon and the troupe arrived, the newspapers were eager, the walls and shopwindows were scarlet with placards, and the town was breathless. Sometimes a thousand people gathered at the station for her arrival.
There were always a few infidels, particularly among the reporters, who had doubted her talents, but when they saw her in the train vestibule, in a long white coat, when she had stood there a second with her eyes closed, lost in prayer for this new community, when slowly she held out her white nervous hands in greeting—then the advance-agent’s work was two-thirds done here and he could go on to whiten new fields for the harvest.
But there was still plenty of discussion before Sharon was rid of the forces of selfishness and able to get down to the job of spreading light.
Local committees were always stubborn, local committees were always jealous, local committees were always lazy, and local committees were always told these facts, with vigor. The heat of the arguments was money.
Sharon was one of the first evangelists to depend for all her profit not on a share of the contributions nor on a weekly offering, but on one night devoted entirely to a voluntary “thank offering,” for her and her crew alone. It sounded unselfish and it brought in more; every devotee saved up for that occasion; and it proved easier to get one fifty-dollar donation than a dozen of a dollar each. But to work up this lone offering to suitably thankful proportions, a great deal of loving and efficient preparation was needed—reminders given by the chief pastors, bankers, and other holy persons of the town, the distribution of envelopes over which devotees were supposed to brood for the whole six weeks of the meetings, and innumerable newspaper paragraphs about the self-sacrifice and heavy expenses of the evangelists.
It was over these innocent necessary precautions that the local committees always showed their meanness. They liked giving over only one contribution to the evangelist, but they wanted nothing said about it till they themselves had been taken care of—till the rent of the hall or the cost of building a tabernacle, the heat, the lights, the advertising, and other expenses had been paid.
Sharon would meet the committee—a score of clergymen, a score of their most respectable deacons, a few angular Sunday School superintendents, a few disapproving wives—in a church parlor, and for the occasion she always wore the gray suit and an air of metropolitan firmness, and swung a pair of pince-nez with lenses made of window-glass. While in familiar words the local chairman was explaining to her that their expenses were heavy, she would smile as though she knew something they could not guess, then let fly at them breathlessly:
“I’m afraid there is some error here! I wonder if you are quite in the mood to forget all material things and really throw yourselves into the self-abnegating glory of a hot campaign for souls? I know all you have to say—as a matter of fact, you’ve forgotten to mention your expenses for watchmen, extra hymn books, and hiring camp-chairs!
“But you haven’t the experience to appreciate my expenses! I have to maintain almost as great a staff—not only workers and musicians but all my other representatives, whom you never see—as though I had a factory. Besides them, I have my charities. There is, for example, the Old Ladies’ Home, which I keep up entirely—oh, I shan’t say anything about it, but if you could see those poor aged women turning to me with such anxious faces—!”
(Where that Old Ladies’ Home was, Elmer never learned.)
“We come here without any guarantee, we depend wholly upon the freewill offering of the last day; and I’m afraid you’re going to stress the local expenses so that people will not feel like giving on the last day even enough to pay the salaries of my assistants. I’m taking—if it were not that I abominate the pitiful and character-destroying vice of gambling, I’d say that I’m taking such a terrible gamble that it frightens me! But there
