“Maybe I ain’t a preacher! Maybe I’m not even a good Christian!” he cried. “Maybe I’ve done a whole lot of things I hadn’t ought to of done. But let me tell you, I respect religion—”
“Oh, amen, praise the Lord, brother,” from Eddie Fislinger.
“—and I don’t propose to let anybody interfere with it. What else have we got except religion to give us hope—”
“Praise the Lord, oh, bless his name!”
“—of ever leading decent lives, tell me that, will you, just tell me that!”
Elmer was addressing the chief of police, who admitted:
“Yuh, I guess that’s right. Well now, we’ll let the meeting go on, and if any more of you fellows interrupt—” This completed the chief’s present ideas on religion and mob-violence. He looked sternly at everybody within reach, and stalked through the crowd, to return to the police station and resume his game of seven-up.
Eddie was soaring into enchanted eloquence:
“Oh, my brethren, now you see the power of the spirit of Christ to stir up all that is noblest and best in us! You have heard the testimony of our brother here, Brother Gantry, to the one and only way to righteousness! When you get home I want each and every one of you to dig out the Old Book and turn to the Song of Solomon, where it tells about the love of the Savior for the Church—turn to the Song of Solomon, the fourth chapter and the tenth verse, where it says—where Christ is talking about the church, and he says—Song of Solomon, the fourth chapter, and the tenth verse—‘How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than wine!’
“Oh, the unspeakable joy of finding the joys of salvation! You have heard our brother’s testimony. We know of him as a man of power, as a brother to all them that are oppressed, and now that he has had his eyes opened and his ears unstopped, and he sees the need of confession and of humble surrender before the throne—Oh, this is a historic moment in the life of Hell-c—of Elmer Gantry! Oh, Brother, be not afraid! Come! Step up here beside me, and give testimony—”
“God! We better get outa here quick!” panted Jim.
“Gee, yes!” Elmer groaned and they edged back through the crowd, while Eddie Fislinger’s piping pursued them like icy and penetrating rain:
“Don’t be afraid to acknowledge the leading of Jesus! Are you boys going to show yourselves too cowardly to risk the sneers of the ungodly?”
They were safely out of the crowd, walking with severe countenances and great rapidity back to the Old Home Sample Room.
“That was a dirty trick of Eddie’s!” said Jim. “God, it certainly was! Trying to convert me! Right before those muckers! If I ever hear another yip out of Eddie, I’ll knock his block off! Nerve of him, trying to lead me up to any mourners’ bench! Fat chance! I’ll fix him! Come on, show a little speed!” asserted the brother to all them that were oppressed.
By the time for their late evening train, the sound conversation of the bartender and the sound qualities of his bourbon had caused Elmer and Jim to forget Eddie Fislinger and the horrors of undressing religion in public. They were the more shocked, then, swaying in their seat in the smoker, to see Eddie standing by them, Bible in hand, backed by his two beaming partners in evangelism.
Eddie bared his teeth, smiled all over his watery eyes, and caroled:
“Oh, fellows, you don’t know how wonderful you were tonight! But, oh, boys, now you’ve taken the first step, why do you put it off—why do you hesitate—why do you keep the Savior suffering as he waits for you, longs for you? He needs you boys, with your splendid powers and intellects that we admire so—”
“This air,” observed Jim Lefferts, “is getting too thick for me. I seem to smell a peculiar and a fishlike smell.” He slipped out of the seat and marched toward the forward car.
Elmer sought to follow him, but Eddie had flopped into Jim’s place and was blithely squeaking on, while the other two hung over them with tender Y.M.C.A. smiles very discomforting to Elmer’s queasy stomach as the train bumped on.
For all his brave words, Elmer had none of Jim’s resolute contempt for the church. He was afraid of it. It connoted his boyhood … His mother, drained by early widowhood and drudgery, finding her only emotion in hymns and the Bible, and weeping when he failed to study his Sunday School lesson. The church, full thirty dizzy feet up to its curiously carven rafters, and the preachers, so overwhelming in their wallowing voices, so terrifying in their pictures of little boys who stole watermelons or indulged in biological experiments behind barns. The awe-oppressed moment of his second conversion, at the age of eleven, when, weeping with embarrassment and the prospect of losing so much fun, surrounded by solemn and whiskered adult faces, he had signed a pledge binding him to give up, forever, the joys of profanity, alcohol, cards, dancing, and the theater.
These clouds hung behind and over him, for all his boldness.
Eddie Fislinger, the human being, he despised. He considered him a grasshopper, and with satisfaction considered stepping on him. But Eddie Fislinger, the gospeler, fortified with just such a pebble-leather Bible (bookmarks of fringed silk and celluloid smirking from the pages) as his Sunday School teachers had wielded when they assured him that God was always creeping about to catch small boys in their secret thoughts—this armored Eddie was an official, and Elmer listened to him uneasily, never quite certain that he might not yet find himself a dreadful person leading a pure a boresome life in a clean frock coat.
“—and remember,” Eddie was wailing, “how terribly dangerous it is to put off the hour of salvation! ‘Watch therefore for you know not what hour your Lord doth come,’ it says. Suppose this train were wrecked! Tonight!”
The train ungraciously took that
