“You see? Where would you spend Eternity, Hellcat? Do you think that any sportin’ round is fun enough to burn in hell for?”
“Oh, cut it out. I know all that stuff. There’s a lot of arguments—You wait’ll I get Jim to tell you what Bob Ingersoll said about hell!”
“Yes! Sure! And you remember that on his deathbed Ingersoll called his son to him and repented and begged his son to hurry and be saved and burn all his wicked writings!”
“Well—Thunder—I don’t feel like talking religion tonight. Cut it out.”
But Eddie did feel like talking religion, very much so. He waved his Bible enthusiastically and found ever so many uncomfortable texts. Elmer listened as little as possible but he was too feeble to make threats.
It was a golden relief when the train bumped to a stop at Gritzmacher Springs. The station was a greasy wooden box, the platform was thick with slush, under the kerosene lights. But Jim was awaiting him, a refuge from confusing theological questions, and with a furious “G’night!” to Eddie he staggered off.
“Why didn’t you make him shut his trap?” demanded Jim.
“I did! Whadja take a sneak for? I told him to shut up and he shut up and I snoozed all the way back and—Ow! My head! Don’t walk so fast!”
Chapter II
I
For years the state of sin in which dwelt Elmer Gantry and Jim Lefferts had produced fascinated despair in the Christian hearts of Terwillinger College. No revival but had flung its sulphur-soaked arrows at them—usually in their absence. No prayer at the Y.M.C.A. meetings but had worried over their staggering folly.
Elmer had been known to wince when President the Rev. Dr. Willoughby Quarles was especially gifted with messages at morning chapel, but Jim had held him firm in the faith of unfaith.
Now, Eddie Fislinger, like a prairie seraph, sped from room to room of the elect with the astounding news that Elmer had publicly professed religion, and that he had endured thirty-nine minutes of private adjuration on the train. Instantly started a holy plotting against the miserable sacrificial lamb, and all over Gritzmacher Springs, in the studies of ministerial professors, in the rooms of students, in the small prayer-meeting room behind the chapel auditorium, joyous souls conspired with the Lord against Elmer’s serene and zealous sinning. Everywhere, through the snowstorm, you could hear murmurs of “There is more rejoicing over one sinner who repenteth—”
Even collegians not particularly esteemed for their piety, suspected of playing cards and secret smoking, were stirred to ecstasy—or it may have been snickering. The football center, in unregenerate days a companion of Elmer and Jim but now engaged to marry a large and sanctified Swedish co-ed from Chanute, rose voluntarily in Y.M.C.A. and promised God to help him win Elmer’s favor.
The spirit waxed most fervent in the abode of Eddie Fislinger, who was now recognized as a future prophet, likely, some day, to have under his inspiration one of the larger Baptist churches in Wichita or even Kansas City.
He organized an all-day and all-night prayer-meeting on Elmer’s behalf, and it was attended by the more ardent, even at the risk of receiving cuts and uncivil remarks from instructors. On the bare floor of Eddie’s room, over Knute Halvorsted’s paint-shop, from three to sixteen young men knelt at a time, and no 1800 revival saw more successful wrestling with the harassed Satan. In fact one man, suspected of Holy Roller sympathies, managed to have the jerks, and while they felt that this was carrying things farther than the Lord and the Baptist association would care to see it, added excitement to praying at three o’clock in the morning, particularly as they were all of them extraordinarily drunk on coffee and eloquence.
By morning they felt sure that they had persuaded God to attend to Elmer, and though it is true that Elmer himself had slept quite soundly all night, unaware of the prayer-meeting or of divine influences, it was but an example of the patience of the heavenly powers. And immediately after those powers began to move.
To Elmer’s misery and Jim’s stilled fury, their sacred room was invaded by hordes of men with uncombed locks on their foreheads, ecstasy in their eyes, and Bibles under their arms. Elmer was safe nowhere. No sooner had he disposed of one disciple, by the use of spirited and blasphemous arguments patiently taught to him by Jim, than another would pop out from behind a tree and fall on him.
At his boardinghouse—Mother Metzger’s, over on Beech Street—a Y.M.C.A. dervish crowed as he passed the bread to Elmer, “Jever study a kernel of wheat? Swonnerful! Think a wonnerful intricate thing like that created itself? Somebody must have created it. Who? God! Anybody that don’t recognize God in Nature—and acknowledge him in repentance—is dumm. That’s what he is!”
Instructors who had watched Elmer’s entrance to classrooms with nervous fury now smirked on him and with tenderness heard the statement that he wasn’t quite prepared to recite. The president himself stopped Elmer on the street and called him My Boy, and shook his hand with an affection which, Elmer anxiously assured himself, he certainly had done nothing to merit.
He kept assuring Jim that he was in no danger, but Jim was alarmed, and Elmer himself more alarmed with each hour, each new greeting of: “We need you with us, old boy—the world needs you!”
Jim did well to dread. Elmer had always been in danger of giving up his favorite diversions—not exactly giving them up, perhaps, but of sweating in agony after enjoying them. But for Jim and his remarks about co-eds who prayed in public and drew their hair back rebukingly from egg-like foreheads, one of these sirens of morality might have snared the easygoing pangynistic Elmer by proximity.
A dreadful young woman from Mexico, Missouri, used to coax Jim to “tell his funny ideas about religion,” and go off in neighs of
