Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk. He leaned against the bar of the Old Home Sample Room, the most gilded and urbane saloon in Cato, Missouri, and requested the bartender to join him in “The Good Old Summer Time,” the waltz of the day.

Blowing on a glass, polishing it and glancing at Elmer through its flashing rotundity, the bartender remarked that he wasn’t much of a hand at this here singing business. But he smiled. No bartender could have done other than smile on Elmer, so inspired and full of gallantry and hell-raising was he, and so dominating was his beefy grin.

“All right, old socks,” agreed Elmer. “Me and my roommate’ll show you some singing as is singing! Meet roommate. Jim Lefferts. Bes’ roommate in world. Wouldn’t live with him if wasn’t! Bes’ quarterback in Milwest. Meet roommate.”

The bartender again met Mr. Lefferts, with protestations of distinguished pleasure.

Elmer and Jim Lefferts retired to a table to nourish the long, rich, chocolate strains suitable to drunken melody. Actually, they sang very well. Jim had a resolute tenor, and as to Elmer Gantry, even more than his bulk, his thick black hair, his venturesome black eyes, you remembered that arousing baritone. He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he always said it sonorously. He could make “Good morning” seem profound as Kant, welcoming as a brass band, and uplifting as a cathedral organ.

“Eh?”

“They say you’re a coward.”

“Heh? Who says I’m a coward?”

Judson Roberts swaggered across from the bed, stood with his hand on Elmer’s shoulder. “They all say it, Hellcat! You see it takes a sure-enough dyed-in-the-wool brave man to be big enough to give Jesus a shot at him, and admit he’s licked when he tries to fight God! It takes a man with guts to kneel down and admit his worthlessness when all the world is jeering at him! And you haven’t got that kind of courage, Elmer. Oh, you think you’re such a big cuss⁠—”

Old Jud swung him around; Old Jud’s hand was crushing his shoulder. “You think you’re too husky, too good, to associate with the poor little sniveling gospel-mongers, don’t you! You could knock out any of ’em, couldn’t you! Well, I’m one of ’em. Want to knock me out?”

With one swift jerk Roberts had his coat off, stood with a striped silk shirt revealing his hogshead torso.

“You bet, Hellcat! I’m willing to fight you for the glory of God! God needs you! Can you think of anything finer for a big husky like you than to spend his life bringing poor, weak, sick, scared folks to happiness? Can’t you see how the poor little skinny guys and all the kiddies would follow you and praise you and admire you, you old son of a gun? Am I a sneaking Christian? Can you lick me? Want to fight it out?”

“No, gee, Mr. Roberts⁠—”

“Judson, you big hunk of cheese, Old Jud!”

“No, gee, Judson, I guess you got me trimmed! I pack a pretty good wallop, but I’m not going to take any chance on you!”

“It’s awful hard for a fellow that’s more used to bucking the line than to talking publicly to express how he means, but sometimes I guess maybe you think about a lot of things even if you don’t always express how you mean, and I want to⁠—what I want to talk about is how if a fellow looks down deep into things and is really square with God, and lets God fill his heart with higher aspirations, he sees that⁠—he sees that Love is the one thing that can really sure-enough lighten all of life’s dark clouds.

“Yes, sir, just Love! It’s the morning and evening star. It’s⁠—even in the quiet tomb, I mean those that are around the quiet tomb, you find it even there. What is it that inspires all great men, all poets and patriots and philosophers? It’s Love, isn’t it? What gave the world its first evidences of immortality? Love! It fills the world with melody, for what is music? What is music? Why! Music is the voice of Love!”

The great President Quarles leaned back and put on his spectacles, which gave a slight appearance of learning to his chin-whiskered countenance, otherwise that of a small-town banker in 1850. He was the center of a row of a dozen initiates on the platform of the Y.M.C.A. auditorium, a shallow platform under a plaster half-dome. The wall behind them was thick with diagrams, rather like anatomical charts, showing the winning of souls in Egypt, the amount spent on whisky versus the amount spent on hymnbooks, and

“In the hustle and bustle of daily life I wonder how many of us stop to think that in all that is highest and best we are ruled not by even our most up-and-coming efforts but by Love? What is Love⁠—the divine Love of which the⁠—the great singer teaches us in Proverbs? It is the rainbow that comes after the dark cloud. It is the morning star and it is also the evening star, those being, as you all so well know, the brightest stars we know. It shines upon the cradle of the little one and when life has, alas, departed, to come no more, you find it still around the quiet tomb. What is it inspires all great men⁠—be they preachers or patriots or great business men? What is it, my brethren, but Love? Ah, it fills the world with melody, with such sacred melodies as we have just indulged in together, for what is music? What, my friends, is music? Ah, what indeed is music but the voice of Love!”

He explained that hatred was low.

However, for the benefit of the more leathery and zealous deacons down front, he permitted them to hate all Catholics, all persons who failed to believe in hell and immersion, and all rich mortgage-holders, wantoning in the betraying smiles of scarlet women, each of whom wore silk and in her bejeweled hand held a ruby glass of perfidious wine.

He closed by lowering his voice to a maternal whisper and relating a totally imaginary but most improving experience with a sinful old gentleman who on his bed of pain had

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